


but honey, i'll be seeing you

by dollsome



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2018-10-17 01:16:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 23,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10583388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollsome/pseuds/dollsome
Summary: Frankie goes with Jacob to Santa Fe. Grace tries to deal with it.





	1. The End (Again)

**Author's Note:**

> I had legit decided I had retired from writing new fanfiction, and then Grace and Frankie season 3 happened to me. LORD HELP US ALL.
> 
> There should be one or two more installments after this one. This story was supposed to be a 1,000 word fluffy comedic shenanigans type of romp. Ha ha ha _what's happening_. Hopefully we'll make it to the properly fluffy comedic shenanigans one of these days.

“Well,” says Grace when there’s nothing else left to say, “goodbye Frankie.”

Frankie gasps, like Grace just said _‘Fuck off, Frankie._ ’ Actually, _‘Fuck off, Frankie’_ probably would have landed better.

“Now, why would you say that?” Frankie scolds, aghast.

Grace laugh-scoffs. It’s become the go-to sound in her repertoire since she moved in with Frankie Bergstein. “Because that’s what you say when someone moves to a different state.”

“ _I_ don’t.”

“Yes, but I’m not the one moving to a different state. You are.”

“ _You_ say goodbye,” Frankie accuses. “ _I_ say hello.” Then her eyes light up, and Grace knows exactly why.

“I probably deserve this,” Grace deadpans.

“ _Hello, hello!_ ” Frankie elaborates in full on song, pulling Grace into a hug. “ _I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say helloooooooo—_ ”

The hug morphs into a sloppy slow dance, and Grace plays along, clasping Frankie’s hand in hers, swaying cheek-to-cheek, enjoying this public display of insanity more than she should. A few innocent passersby, guilty of nothing more than wanting to get to their train on time, look over in confusion. That would have been reason enough for Grace to fight her way out of Frankie’s arms once, but just now she doesn’t mind the audience.

Well. Most of the audience. Jacob watches them with a smile on his face. Despite everything, Grace feels a little guilty when she catches his eye.

“She’s all yours now, Jacob,” Grace says as brightly as she can, twirling Frankie toward him.

Jacob chuckles. “Lucky me.”

Frankie laughs too, settling into his arms.

“Lucky you,” Grace says, but the pair of them are making googly eyes and she’s not sure anyone hears her.

Then Frankie turns back, clasping her hands to her heart like she’s just been shot there. “Grace Hanson. You superstar. What am I going to do without you?”

Grace almost parrots the question back, but the words stick in her throat.

“You’ll be fabulous,” she answers instead. “And probably lose your purse for good.”

Frankie laughs and pulls her in for one last hug, one of those rocking-back-and-forth, holding-on-for-dear-life hugs that Grace has despised for most of her life. For the last time in who knows how long, Grace rests against Frankie’s shoulder and breathes in tea tree shampoo and clove soap and a hint of pot. Grace caught her smoking early this morning, earlier than Frankie usually gets up; when Grace came downstairs, it was to find Frankie sitting outside and staring out at the ocean with a joint between her fingers. She turned back at the sound of Grace approaching, and the aching look in her eyes stopped Grace’s heart. _She's going to stay,_ Grace thought—really believed—for a second. Then Frankie smiled her same old Frankie smile and started chattering, snapping back into normalcy or at least a very good impression of it, and now they’re here.

They’re here and what it all comes down to is that this hug smells more like home than the house Grace lived in for forty years.

Not that it matters anymore. This is it; it’s goodbye.

 

+

 

Grace comes home to the empty beach house. Looking around makes her think of the time they were robbed; all of the valuables plucked clean out of their lives.

The fact that she’s thinking of Frankie’s junk as valuables is a sign she’s well and truly lost it.

She sits down at the table in the living room, meaning to open her laptop and get some work done, but she can’t seem to move. Not in a floor people way. Just in a ... way.

She closes her eyes.

It’s quiet. Freakishly so, for this place. All she can hear is the distant pealing of one of Frankie’s wind chimes outside; it must have been forgotten in the haste of packing up a whole life.

She just listens to it for awhile, eyes closed. She hasn’t got the slightest idea what she’ll do with herself when she opens her eyes and gets started at this business of life without Frankie. It sounds so thankless.

Then her phone rings, snapping her out of it.

“ _Hello, helloooo!_ ” Frankie serenades.

“Already? It’s only been—” Grace laughs, checking her watch. “—forty-eight minutes.”

“Which is forty-eight minutes too long. You’re not getting rid of me that easy, girlfriend.”

“Shouldn’t you be paying attention to your boyfriend?”

“He dozed off already. I demand entertainment.”

“I was just sitting down to work,” Grace protests automatically.

“Oh, boo. Take the day off. Celebrate your newfound freedom! You’re an independent woman now.”

“Oh really? What was I before?”

“Hmm.” Frankie ponders for a minute, then decides, “My ride-or-die bitch.”

“Obviously,” Grace says dryly.

“And that was a full time job. But now you’re a free agent. You’ve got the whole place to yourself. You can walk around naked whenever you want.”

“Who’s to say I’m not right now?”

“Me _ow_. I left too soon.”

“Well, you can always come back,” Grace says. It was meant to be a joke, but it doesn’t sound like a joke.

It’s quiet for just a second too long.

Then Frankie asks, “You did leave the shoes by the door?”

“Yes, Frankie.”

She doubts a pair of home-painted rainbow Crocs is going to scare off any prospective burglars, but giving them up had been a big deal for Frankie. She’d kissed each shoe goodbye and everything, paying no mind to Grace’s lecture about why putting your mouth on your shoes is never a good idea.

“Good. That’ll show ‘em.”

 _Who??_ , Grace would ordinarily ask. But for now she just appreciates the gesture. “Yep. That’ll show ‘em.”

“If you wanted,” Frankie says tentatively, “to get another ... G-U-N now that I’m not there anymore, I suppose ... I suppose I would understand.”

“I’ll be all right without one,” Grace says, even though she’s been thinking about it herself. It’s the sensible thing to do, of course, especially now that the only person who objected to her having a gun isn’t even going to live in the same state anymore. She isn’t feeling particularly sensible today.

“Good,” Frankie says, sighing. “You don’t need that negative energy in your life. And if you—if you wanted to get another roommate, I would understand that too.”

“After you? No way.”

“I wore you out,” Frankie says, amused.

Grace chuckles. “You’re a hard act to follow.”

“And don’t you forget it.” Frankie hums thoughtfully. “Speaking of. We did some classic Beatles; what should I serenade you with next? I do a mean Hotline Bling.”

“I know,” Grace says. “I got to hear you sing it in the shower every morning for an excruciating three weeks of my life.”

“Then you know that I like to do all my own beats.”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

Frankie starts beatboxing with aplomb. And probably spittle. Grace can only imagine what her neighbors on the train are thinking.

Yet she wouldn’t mind sitting next to her right now. Going off on some new adventure together. Horrifying the general populace in the process. With Frankie, Grace quite likes horrifying the general populace.

Grace doesn’t realize she’s crying until she hears herself let out a terrible shaky sob of a sound. She claps her hand over her mouth like that will somehow fix it, but it’s too late.

“What?” Frankie asks, going from terrible beatboxing to sweet concern in a second flat.

“Nothing.”

“Graaaace.”

Grace sniffles. “I’m just—I’m just missing you already, I guess.”

“Oh, honey,” Frankie says, “I’m right here.”

Grace nods, which is silly; it’s not like Frankie can see her, now is it? “Go on,” she says, taking a steadying breath. “Scare the unsuspecting passengers with Drake.”

“Anything for you, lady,” Frankie says fondly.

 

+

 

Weeks go by, and they might as well be in the same place. Frankie sends her pictures all day, of everything from her favorite plants in Jacob’s yard to the nail polish likenesses of her friends and family that she painted on each of her toenails. (Bud and Coyote occupy the left big toenail; Grace made it onto the right, which fills her with a surge of irrational gladness.) Grace texts Frankie pictures of the immaculately clean kitchen (she captions it with _‘This is what a kitchen is supposed to look like’_ ) and reminders to take her medications on time. She calls the Walgreens pharmacy nearest to Jacob’s house and pretends to be Frankie to double-check that all the medications are on auto-refill. Just to be safe.

Despite the distance, they still spend most of their days in constant contact, and to her surprise, Frankie doesn’t show any sign of neglecting the business. In fact, she’s working on spreading the word about Vybrant to local businesses in Santa Fe. Grace can only imagine how those pitches are going without her.

But then those businesses start to show interest, and Grace is struck anew with that old familiar feeling that she’s underestimated Frankie terribly.

Granted, Frankie responds to Grace’s order to get a more professional email address by sending her a “Hey, girl” from FrancesTheWorkingGirl@gmail.com, but still.

All of this is better than she had expected it would be; when she’d first heard about Frankie leaving, she had imagined her disappearing entirely, cut from Grace’s life save for birthday cards and the occasional visit to the kids. This isn’t that at all. She still has Frankie’s chatter following her around all day, even if Frankie herself isn’t there with it. 

But the house is still quiet when the phone calls end, and she can’t quite get herself to like that. She doesn’t take down the wind chimes.

 

+

 

Grace falls into the habit of going into Frankie’s studio. It’s the one place that still feels like Frankie might walk in at any moment. She’d left lots of her paintings behind, claiming that she wanted them to be in the same place as her loved ones. Grace looks at them with renewed interest now that Frankie isn’t here. She still can’t quite tell if they’re good, but they’re so thoroughly Frankie. She thinks about picking some of them out to hang in the house.

Sometimes, she just lies down on the sofa in there and drifts off to sleep. She should balk at that—the routine afternoon nap might as well be a sign that says ‘Take Me, Grim Reaper; There’s Nothing Left On Earth For Me’—but she grows to like it. It’s a comfort, waking up surrounded by pieces of Frankie. Sometimes it’s the best part of her day, that moment before she remembers that Frankie is gone.


	2. The Gay House

And all right.

There’s a part—a really terrible part—of Grace that hopes one day Frankie will wake up and realize that she hates Santa Fe and wants to come home.

It doesn’t seem likely.

“If I could have a place-shaped soulmate,” Frankie announces via Facetime two months into her new life, “it’s—well, it would be the groovy love child of Portland and The Shire.”

“That checks out,” says Grace. She’s sitting out on the patio, a book in her lap. She gets much more reading done now that she lives alone. Still, she doesn’t mind the interruption.

“But here is a close second. Today I went to Spiritual Happy Hour. Oh, Grace. You should’ve been there. I reached a whole new plane of consciousness, and there was a potluck after. The vegan meatballs were succulent.”

“I’ll stick to traditional happy hour, thanks.”

“Pshh. One of these days we’ll start nurturing your subconscious. I like to call her Brunhilde.”

“She doesn’t like being called that,” Off Frankie’s scowl, Grace adds, “What? That’s me nurturing my subconscious.”

“Typical Brunhilde,” Frankie declares. She looks good, well rested and glowy, her hair haphazardly pulled back by a bandana with little howling coyote silhouettes all over it. She keeps reaching into a box of spring mix salad and shoving handfuls into her mouth, Frankie’s way of proving that she’s sticking to Grace’s nutrition guidelines. (“These should have been Sweetos,” Frankie lamented earlier. “Yes, that’s right; they make sweet Cheetos now, and I had to walk right past them to the produce aisle. I hope you’re happy.” Grace is.)

“You have arugula in your hair,” Grace says now, pointing uselessly.

Frankie fiddles around trying to get it, and Grace wishes she could just reach through the screen and pick it out.

“Oh, Jacob will get it,” Frankie finally says, giving up.

“That’s right,” says Grace. “You’ve got somebody to pick the green leafy vegetables out of your hair.”

It comes out sounding more accusatory than she’d meant it to. Fortunately, Frankie doesn’t seem to notice; all she does is serenely reply, “It doesn’t suck.”

“And you and Jacob, you’re good?” Grace feels like she’s reciting lines in a play. She tries to smile without looking like she’s, well, a bad actor in a play. (God knows she’s seen enough bad actors lately; Robert and Sol have joined an improv group.)

“Yeah,” Frankie says, with a lazy warm smile that makes Grace’s chest ache. “We’re good.”

“I’m glad.” She is. She’s glad.

“When are you coming to visit me?” Frankie asks, her smile brightening into that too-eager grin.

Grace laughs darkly. “I think Jacob’s probably had enough of me for this year.”

“Oh, who cares? I haven’t.”

“No?”

“Never,” Frankie declares. “Never never never. Well. Sometimes.”

“I thought so.”

“But only because you won’t get high with me when we watch Great British Bake-Off.”

“ _No one_ gets high to watch Great British Bake-Off.”

“Well, that’s just malarkey. They tell you to do it _in the title of the show_. That’s why the title changed to The Great British Baking Show when they aired it on PBS. America’s hate-on for weed strikes again.”

“Actually,” says Grace, happy to contribute some interesting information, “it’s because Pillsbury owns the trademark for the phrase ‘Bake-Off’—”

“Pfft. You can’t own _phrases_.”

“You can. You literally can. Your husband of forty years was a lawyer; you should know that—”

“Nah, this has anti-weed conspiracy all over it. Let the show be watched as it was meant to be watched! Remember the contestant who used hemp flour? _He_ knew. Now, come on. You didn’t answer me. When are you coming to visit?”

Something in Grace seizes up at the question. “Oh, Frankie, I don’t know. There’s just so much going on here. There’s Vybrant—”

“Who’s to say you can’t get work done here? You saw the picture of my work station.” It was, Grace has to admit, not bad; there’d been a desk and everything. “Wait until you see my work rainstick. It’s the height of professionalism. It makes only the sound of the very lightest productivity-inspiring drizzle. And before you ask: yes, it has increased my need to get up for pee breaks, but not nearly as badly as a regular rainstick would. ”

“I wasn’t going to ask, but okay.”

Frankie scoffs knowingly. “Yeah right.”

“And it’s not only work. There’s the girls. Mallory’s going through her divorce.”

“Mallory’s happier than she’s been in years.”

“Brianna’s seeing Barry again. I should probably stick around for when that inevitably goes south.”

“Brianna can take care of herself. And personally, I think it’s gonna go north this time.” Frankie’s smile is calmly prophetic, like she’s some sort of benevolent fairytale woods witch. “I’ve got a feeling.”

“Well,” Grace reaches, “someone ought to be here for Bud and Allison when the baby comes.”

“That’s months from now!”

“Who knows? Allison strikes me as a real preemie-birther.”

Frankie snorts. “So you can’t leave for even a few days in case you miss the improbable birth of _my_ son’s kid?”

“I really think I should be here, Frankie. I’m the closest thing to a paternal grandmother the child has.”

As soon as the words are out of her mouth, Grace knows she’s fucked up.

Sure enough, all of the light goes out of Frankie’s face.

“I’m sorry,” Grace says quickly. “I didn’t mean—”

“You promised you wouldn’t hold this against me,” Frankie says, her voice low.

“I’m not,” Grace says desperately.

“You told me to go and be happy.”

“I know. And I’m glad you did—”

The view of Frankie goes all wobbly; Grace can tell she’s angry-pointing at the screen, even if her finger doesn’t quite make it into frame. “You _know_ I’m coming back as soon as the first contraction hits that sweet girl’s frail fourteenth-century inbred princess body.”

“I know,” Grace says desperately.

“And I’ve already sent them a list of all the raddest local doulas I know.”

“Yes, you sent it to me too; I don’t exactly get why—”

“WHO DOESN’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT RAD LOCAL DOULAS?” Frankie thunders, and throws a handful of lettuce at the screen.

Grace flinches.

“Just because I’m not there,” Frankie adds, quieter, “doesn’t mean I’m not being a good mother, or a good grandmother.”

“I know. I shouldn’t have said it—”

“I have to go.”

“No you don’t,” Grace protests. “Frankie, wait—”

“I do,” Frankie insists, glowering. “I have to go be super mad at you, and I’ll enjoy it way more if I don’t have to look at your stupid face. It’s beautiful, but _God_ , is it stupid.”

“Thank you?”

“Fuck off,” says Frankie, and her face disappears. 

Grace stares in dismay at her phone.

“Trouble in paradise?” comes a hideously chipper female voice.

Grace looks over to see one of the new neighbors out on the patio next door—a middle aged woman wearing a floppy hat and holding a watering can shaped like a duck. Grace has a vague memory of a new family moving in a few months ago, but she hadn’t paid much attention. She’d been too preoccupied by Frankie’s stroke, and then Frankie leaving. The world had shrunk for her during that time. Now, technically, her world is more wide open than it’s been before in her whole adult life.

That doesn’t mean she has patience for newbies.

“Yep,” she says flatly.

“Where _is_ your wife these days?” the woman asks, like they’re some kind of small talk buddies. Ugh.

“She moved out,” Grace says.

“Oh no!”

Then it occurs to her to address the other part. “And she’s—she _was_ my roommate. Platonic roommate. Not my wife.”

“Oh,” the neighbor says. “I’m sorry! That’s what she told us when she introduced herself right after we moved in, but she didn’t specify the ‘platonic’ part and we thought you were just old fashioned. She brought us some banana bread; I think it may have been rotten, but the thought was sweet. The Johanssens on the other side of us did say your house was the gayest one in the neighborhood. Didn’t something gay happen there?” All of this is said, remarkably, in a tone of voice that suggests this is an acceptable question to ask.

“Our ex-husbands left us for each other,” Grace recaps stonily.

“Oh!” The woman’s eyes widen. “How ...” She flounders.

“Gay?” Grace deadpans.

“But in a sad way!” says the woman. “We thought it was a happy gay house.”

“Nope,” Grace says, turning to go.

“Too bad,” the woman simpers.

It would be smartest to just let it go. Instead, Grace turns and gives her a faux-sweet smile. They used to call it her murder smile back in her days at Say Grace. Frankie has since dubbed it the ‘Oh shit, run!’ smile. “Say, what’s the second gayest house in the neighborhood? Is there an official ranking? Should I have been given a pamphlet about this?”

Finally, the idiot seems to pick up on the fact that Grace isn’t exactly delighting in her company.

“So nice to talk to you,” the woman says, scampering toward her door. “Bye bye now.”

God, people suck.

Which just makes it worse to lose one of the rare ones that doesn’t.

Usually after a fight, Grace likes to remove herself from the situation. She doesn’t like to grovel when she’s not wanted. But there’s something worse about fighting now that she and Frankie can’t stumble into each other’s orbits and get pulled back in. It would be so easy—too easy—to drift apart for good. 

So Grace takes a series of zen-inducing deep breaths that would make Frankie proud, goes inside to fix herself a martini, and prepares to grovel.

 

+

 

Frankie finally calls two hours later. It snaps Grace right out of the half-asleep stupor she’d sunk into on the couch after an hour and fifteen minutes of apology attempts.

“Thank God,” she says instead of hello. Then it occurs to her that that’s probably what you’re supposed to say when you’ve been fearing for someone’s life, not when you’ve been stressing over their resentment toward your stupid and beautiful face.

“I was busy rage-eating the vegan meatballs I smuggled out of Spiritual Happy Hour.”

“Did the succulent vegan meatballs temper said rage?” Grace asks.

“They did,” Frankie says regally. “Your four missed calls and thirty-seven text messages helped, too.”

“I didn’t write—” Grace pulls the phone from her ear to check the messages screen. “Oh.”

“No one’s ever sent me that many text messages in a row before,” Frankie says. “Not even Allison that time we had her and Bud over for dinner and I gave her the go-ahead to list all her allergies for me ahead of time. And _that_ time broke my phone.”

“That’s because you yelled ‘give it a rest, you genetic monstrosity’ and threw your phone into the toilet,” Grace reminds her.

“Oh yeah,” says Frankie. Then she giggles. Frankie’s ability to crack herself up even months after the fact will forever astound Grace.

“I really didn’t mean to hurt you,” Grace says. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“I know.” Frankie sighs. “It’s just hard. I still miss having immediate access to all my favorite people. And don’t even get me started on life without Del Taco.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Say. If you were to mail someone a modest quantity of Mexican food ...”

“No, Frankie,” Grace says firmly.

“Oh, fine.”

“If you can’t have Del Taco, well, at least you’re spared the new neighbors. I just met the one with the floppy hat and the duck-shaped watering can.”

“Brenda? Ohh yeah, she’s the worst. I went over to bring the family some kale loaf to welcome them to the neighborhood—it was that day I invented kale loaf; you remember.”

“How could I ever forget? You wrote it on the calendar in such big letters.”

“Anyway, the walls were covered with ‘paintings’—I hope you can hear my air quotes—that had all clearly been done at those goddamned ladies paint nights!” Grace can _hear_ her sneering.

“Ooh, you hate ladies paint night,” Grace says, enjoying the chance to talk about someone she doesn’t like with someone she does. “It ties with capitalism as the social institution that fills you with the most liquid hot rage.”

“Aw, Grace. You _were_ listening!”

“Your volume levels that day didn’t really leave me a choice. Well, I ran into Brenda for the first time today. She called our house a sad gay house.”

“How dare she? Our house is a happy gay house!”

“Or just a house,” Grace suggests. “With no sexual orientation attached to it. Because _it’s a house_.”

“I guess,” says Frankie, unbothered. “Aw. I miss that happy gay house.”

Grace’s eyes drift to the corner where Frankie’s ridiculous swing chair and one billion throw pillows used to be. She still hasn’t figured out what to put there in their place. “Do you ever think of ... coming back? Since you miss—the boys and everyone so much?”

Frankie is quiet. “No,” she says at last. “No, I’m good here.”

“I’m glad,” Grace says. She’s like one of those dolls with the pull strings in conversations with Frankie lately. Pull on hers, and it’s _I’m glad_ , over and over. What else can she say?

“I’m finally getting chickens,” Frankie adds, brighter.

“Better there than here,” says Grace; she means to sound funny, but doesn’t quite manage it.

“We’ve been working on a coop. Jacob handles the construction; I’m in charge of the feng shui. Are you sure you don’t want to come visit? Not to see the chickens, obviously—you’ve made your feelings very clear about our avian sisters—but, well, to see the me?”

 _Say yes. Just say yes. What’s wrong with you?_ Grace exhales shakily. “I can’t just now, Frankie.”

“Okay,” Frankie says, quiet.

“But yay for the chicken coop,” Grace adds, in history’s sorriest attempt at enthusiasm.

“Yeah,” Frankie says. “Yay for the chicken coop.”

 

+

 

The constant communication gets a little less constant after that.

What used to be an all day conversation turns into a check-in before bed. Then the check-ins turn into every other day hellos. It isn’t that Grace wants to talk to Frankie any less. Experiencing life with Frankie has become such a given to her that she doesn’t quite know what to do when some small thing happens and Frankie isn’t there to hear about it, to (over)react to it. Grace’s mind reaches for Frankie like her hands reach for a drink or a Xanax. It’s become a reflex.

But there’s no getting past the fact that she turned down a perfectly friendly invitation to visit her friend in her new home. Grace doesn’t even know how to justify it; she can’t, not logically. She just knows that if she went there, she wouldn’t be able to breathe in that house, Frankie’s new home with Jacob. It would be even worse than the time she and Frankie took the “tour” of the shoebox Coyote lives in.

And it’s good, that they aren’t talking as much. It really wasn’t a sustainable system; they’re adults, for God’s sake, not smitten teenagers who can’t decide who should hang up first. Frankie doesn’t deserve to be stuck dealing with the fact that the best friend she’s got won’t even come to visit her. Frankie deserves to enjoy her new life, succulent vegan meatballs and true love and poultry and all, without having to worry about anything else. Grace can at least do that much for her.

 

+

 

Grace starts seeing Nick occasionally, mostly because it’s a way to get him to stop calling all the time and she’s bored and he’s company. The man is a beautiful pain in the ass, but Grace has grown suspiciously tolerant of beautiful pains in the ass.

He takes her out to lovely dinners, the symphony, films with subtitles. It feels like the first time in forever that she’s gotten to spend her time doing things she’s actually interested in. With Frankie, all of the films they watched had subtitles, which is to say closed captions for the hearing impaired. Most of the time Frankie forgot her glasses and couldn’t read them anyway, which meant an hour and a half of her asking Grace, “What did he say? What did she say?”

So it’s nice, for once, to have someone she can bust out her best self for.

And yet when she comes home and takes off her shoes and settles onto the couch, she doesn’t replay the moments she just spent with Nick—and there have been some good moments. Instead, she imagines what Frankie might have said if she was still here. How she would’ve turned around from reading a book or yelling at an episode of Alaskan Bush People and leaned over the back of the couch, resting her head on her crossed arms, and teased Grace about her hot night out. Then she probably would have cooed at Grace’s feet about the patriarchal hell trap high heels they’d been forced into. Grace would have tried to reply in defense of her shoes; Frankie would’ve said something like, _Excuse you, this conversation is between me and the metatarsals._ Grace would have rolled her eyes but happily settled down on the couch anyway, and Frankie would have moved aside to make room for her like always.

The rhythm of their life together is still stuck in her head like a song. Right now, it feels harder to get out of her system than even her marriage was. With Robert, life had been carefully choreographed; the most important thing was to master the steps. With Frankie, finally, there had been music.

 

+

 

“You know,” Nick tells her one day when they’re out to brunch, “we never did get that balloon ride.”

“That’s right,” Grace says, keeping her voice smooth. This had to come up sooner or later. She sips her Bloody Mary.

“What do you say to a do-over?”

Grace doesn’t usually remember her dreams, but she thinks she must keep dreaming about being up there with Frankie; it would explain why the memory persists, green and golden, catching her at odd moments like it’s dug its fingers into her and won’t let go. “I don’t think so.”

“Oh?”

“I could barely stomach it the first time,” Grace says. “I just did it as a favor to a friend. I’m afraid my hot air balloon days are behind me.”

“Fear of heights?”

“Yes,” Grace says. “Yes, exactly.”

“I’ll hold you,” he says teasingly, his eyes twinkling. “I promise I won’t let you fall.”

“You’ll have to find another date for that adventure,” Grace says.

When they leave the restaurant, he kisses her goodbye, and she makes sure to throw one last smile his way as she’s crossing the parking lot. As soon as she gets into her car, she bursts into tears. She spends the entire drive home sobbing like a baby while the radio tells her to _Push it, push it real good!_

 _Change the station!_ says the sane voice that still exists somewhere in her head. _Stop crying over nothing!_

She does neither of those things. The song is strangely consoling in its awfulness. The only thing worse than it is Grace’s ability to handle existence these days.

When she pulls up to the house, it’s to find Brianna, Mallory, and Mallory’s posse of offspring waiting out front. Damn it. She had totally forgotten that they were dropping by.

Grace lunges for the radio dial and switches it to the classical station. She pretends to check her makeup in the mirror and hastily dabs at her face with a tissue. God, it’s a disaster. She looks like something Frankie would paint as a commentary on what global warming has done to Mother Nature.

“Were you just crying and blasting Salt ‘N Pepa?” Brianna says by way of greeting when Grace strides out of the car.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Grace says, hurrying past Brianna and Mallory to the kids. Kids are too oblivious to pick up on one grownup’s slight emotional meltdown. You just have to put exclamation points at the ends of your sentences and they’ll go with anything you say. She throws her arms open. “Hello, hello, hello! My beautiful grandbabies!”

They all stare at her doubtfully. Even the babies, who really should be too young to be capable of making such judgmental faces.

“What’s up with you, Grandma?” Madison finally asks, wrinkling her nose.

 _Good fucking question,_ Grace doesn’t say, but only just barely.


	3. The Fucking Plums

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everybody for your wonderful comments, and I'm so sorry there's been a lag in updating! Life got busy and inspiration-sapping, but now I've finally got some free time to continue working on this.
> 
> I predict that there will be one more chapter after this, but honestly, this story is growing so unwieldy that who can tell for sure??

Grace invites all the kids over for dinner one evening; it seems like the best way to get them off her back. Mallory and Brianna had been checking up on her regularly even before the Salt ‘N Pepa incident; now they’re obsessed. Apparently in their eyes, Grace’s will to live left right with Frankie. Even Bud and Coyote pop by the house sometimes, despite the fact that the only person living in it is their father’s husband’s ex-wife, which isn’t exactly a category Hallmark makes greeting cards for. She suspects Frankie put them up to it.

On the night of the get-together, Grace sets the table out on the patio. She takes her time arranging a place setting for each person, then puts out fresh flowers she picked up at the farmer’s market. (Why she was there in the first place is beyond her; she’d gotten into the habit of going with Frankie so that Frankie would stop stealing the flowers out of her bedroom, and will get right back out of the habit now that Frankie’s gone – the vendors kept giving her the soft, pitying smiles usually reserved for widows.)

She finds Frankie’s beloved cornhusks-with-faces salt and pepper shakers while she’s in the kitchen, so she sets them on the table too. She can’t believe that Frankie left behind her favorite spoils from robbing Sol and Robert’s wedding gifts. She also can’t believe she’s willingly putting objects so hideous in a place where other people will see them. But Frankie would be pleased if she knew that her ugly little corn babies were on display for her much nicer, albeit sometimes just as baffling, human babies.

On instinct, Grace snaps a picture of the salt and pepper shakers, posed in front of the flowers. She’s halfway through sending it to Frankie, almost done texting _Guess who misses you?_ underneath, when she stops.

She stares at the unsent text.

_Guess who mi_

No. Not that. Something else.

_Guess who you forgot._

No.

_Look who you abandoned._

Definitely not.

_Come back here and get these creepy things out of my house._

God damn it.

Grace sighs and deletes the text altogether.

 

+

 

Bud brings Allison along to dinner, and she regales them all with graphic tales of the health complications of pregnancy. Brianna mimes hanging herself during Allison’s recreation of an episiotomy performed on a roast potato. (Stolen from Bud. Allison is allergic to potatoes.) It’s all Grace can do not to follow in her daughter’s footsteps there. She suspects there’s only one person who would have been able to remotely stomach this display. Frankie would have been punching the air and shouting about pussy power. Grace just tries to focus on her glass of wine instead. Bud may have brought Allison, but he also brought wine.

Allison finally finishes up the potato procedure, then excuses herself to the bathroom for the fourth time.

“Not only do I not want a baby,” Brianna announces, breaking the stunned silence, “I kind of want to punch the next one I see right in its little baby face.”

“Brianna!” Mallory chides.

“I said ‘kind of’!” Brianna retorts.

“Childbirth is a miracle,” Bud says defensively.

“No,” says Coyote, “a miracle is me still being alive after seeing that.”

“Hear, hear!” says Brianna, lifting her glass in his direction. 

“Oh my God, Mallory,” Coyote says, his mouth falling open. “Are you okay? You’ve done that _four times._ ”

“I’m aware,” Mallory says dryly.

“Is there ... anything left down there?”

Mallory bristles. “What does that even _mean_?”

“Not in a bad way,” Coyote adds desperately. “I’m sure it’s nice!”

Brianna widens her eyes at Grace in a way that clearly means ‘check out this idiot’. Grace nods and pours herself more wine.

“Okay, no more of that,” Bud—ever the fixer—says quickly. “And all right, I’ll admit it: I guess Allison did get a little gnarly.”

“In the same way that I’m a little bitchy,” Brianna says.

Bud turns to Grace. “Sorry about the ... potato.”

Frankie would’ve been able to handle this. She’s the only one in the family who seems, incredibly, to like Allison. Grace figures she might as well try to welcome the newest weirdo into the clan on Frankie’s behalf. It’s what Frankie would want, if she were here. She’d be casting stern ‘be nice’ glances Grace’s way all night. At least when she wasn’t busy making the salt and pepper shakers kiss.

“She’s a handful,” Grace says tactfully, sipping her wine.

Bud smiles fondly. “Yeah, but she’s my handful. My strange, strange, beautiful handful.”

“I know the feeling,” Grace says, laughing a little.

“Really?” Brianna says. “Because Dad has had his moments, but I’m pretty sure he’s shocked and appalled a table of dinner guests exactly zero times.”

“They were out to dinner when he told Mom and Frankie about him and Sol,” Mallory points out.

Brianna shrugs. “So, one time.”

“Brianna, she obviously means our mom,” Coyote says, and throws a grin Grace’s way.

“Oh yeah,” Brianna says, smiling in amusement. “Mom, I always forget you’ve been married twice.”

Grace says, “Oh, psshhht,” and then realizes she’s just spitting out random nonsense sounds. Fortunately, none of the kids seem to notice.

“Our mom was lucky to have you,” Bud says, patting her hand.

That ‘was’ sticks into Grace like a pin.

“The luckiest,” says Coyote.

She can feel it welling up again. The pitiful, incomprehensible need to sob her eyes out. Never mind that she’s got witnesses. Witnesses that will definitely report Grace’s new status as emotionally deranged to Frankie.

“Who wants ice cream?” Grace says, hurrying up from the table.

“You bought ice cream?” says Mallory.

“With sugar?” says Brianna. “Without Frankie’s bad influence?”

“Me,” says Coyote. “Ice cream. Ice cream is worth living for. Even after what I just learned about babies coming out of potatoes.”

Grace doesn’t slow down until she’s in the kitchen. Once she’s reached it, she stands in front of the open freezer, surveying its contents and letting the cold air drift over her. There’s still a bag of tater tots shoved in the back of one of the shelves; one of the items that slipped under the radar during Frankie’s Grace-inspired purge of junk food from the house.

Was, was, was.

“Mom?” comes Mallory’s voice. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Grace says, wiping her eyes. “Allergies.”

“You don’t have any allergies,” says Mallory patiently.

“Unless you’re allergic to Allison,” Brianna says. “Because I get that.”

“I’m fine. I’m just tired.” She turns, and there her daughters are, looking at their mother like she’s something feeble and broken. She gestures to Mallory. “I should be asking you if you’re okay, for God’s sake.”

“I’m good,” Mallory says.

Grace closes the fridge and scrutinizes her. Parental fretting seems like the best distraction. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Mallory says. “I mean, it’s weird. I was so used the routine of life with Mitch, and it’s been hard making the kids understand that we’re not going back to the way it used to be. But I’m good. I’m optimistic about the future. I think.”

“Good,” Grace says.

“Then again,” Mallory adds with a sigh, “talk to me in a year when I’ve discovered exactly how impossible it is to find a man who wants to date a single mom with four kids.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Grace puts a hand on Mallory’s shoulder. “You’re a beautiful young woman, and you can do much better than Mitch.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Mallory says. Her smile is sweet but clearly unconvinced.

“You’ll find someone one day who will really be there for you, and won’t put you second to anything.”

“I don’t know about that,” Mallory says with a little rueful laugh that tugs at Grace’s heart.

“Oh, you will,” Grace insists. “Someone who’ll love and adore you, and never make you feel like you’re stuck or bored or unwanted. Take it from me: you can’t imagine how much better life gets when you’ve found the right person to live it with.”

She doesn’t realize until she’s stopped talking that the girls are giving her strange looks.

“What?” Grace says warily.

They just keep staring at her.

“... You mean Frankie?” Mallory says at last.

“No,” Grace says abruptly.

Which is absurd, because—

Because she does.

She means Frankie.

Her second spouse.

Oh, _God._

“Who else would you mean?” Brianna says. “There’s no way it’s the cougar cub. You’re so clearly only using him for his hot young sixty-year-old bod.”

“Will you stop calling Nick that? ‘Cougar cub’ is not a term.”

“Good thing I’m a linguistic trendsetter then,” says Brianna, unbothered.

“Losing Frankie was really hard on you, wasn’t it?” says Mallory meanwhile, looking at Grace with an unsettling level of interest.

“She was my best friend,” Grace says lightly. “You don’t find many of those at this age. That’s all. But I’m a big girl; I’m fine on my own.”

“Maybe you should tell her,” Mallory persists.

“Tell her what?”

“How much you miss her.”

Grace scoffs. “Don’t be silly. What would she do about it? She’s in Santa Fe. Her life is in Santa Fe now.”

“But maybe if she knew—”

“Frankie is happy,” Grace interrupts. “She found a wonderful relationship at a stage in life where that’s not easy, and we should be nothing but supportive of her decision to go be with Jacob.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Mom,” Brianna says. “She found _two_ wonderful relationships. Although she definitely picked the foxier option. No offense.”

Grace knows, technically, that it’s just Brianna being Brianna.

But it makes her think of Jacob, perfect Jacob who could do no wrong—never mind that he was asking Frankie to leave her whole life behind for him. Never mind that he seemed so sure that Grace couldn’t possibly be worth staying for.

And he was right, wasn’t he? Frankie left.

“Oh shit,” Brianna says.

Grace realizes her feelings must be written all over her face again. God damn it. She’s booking the Botox appointment to end all Botox appointments first thing tomorrow. Good luck to this face at ever showing another sliver of emotion. Maybe she’ll get her tear ducts removed too.

“That was a joke,” Brianna says, her eyes wide with panic. “I was joking. Who can resist the lure of a sexy yam farmer, am I right? Oh, Mom. Stop ... don’t ... make your face stop doing that. Please??”

Grace turns away and opens the freezer again. “Go ask the boys if they want ice cream.”

“But you already did—”

“Please.”

“Yep,” Brianna says, “I will do that so hard right now.” She flees.

Mallory looks worried. “Mom ...”

“Go on, honey,” Grace urges.

Mallory stares at her until Grace makes a shooing motion. Even then, there’s a look in her eyes that Grace doesn’t like, a this-isn’t-over gleam. “Okay.”

 

+

 

Grace painstakingly dishes out bowls of ice cream for each of the kids (except Allison. Allison gets plums; it's the only remotely sweet food Grace can remember for sure she can eat). The ice cream is still completely frozen, and it’s hell on her wrists attacking it with the stupid ice cream scoop, but she almost appreciates having something to channel her anger into. This is a disaster. It was supposed to be the ‘convince the kids their mother’s okay’ dinner, not the ‘Mom officially needs therapy even more than usual’ dinner.

She arranges all of the bowls on a tray, taking her time; finally, when she can’t delay it any longer, she takes a deep breath and fixes her hair and heads back outside.

Well, almost.

Brianna and Mallory are standing right outside, some distance away from Coyote and Bud and Allison at the table. On instinct, Grace hangs back to listen.

Mallory is talking, hushed. “I’m going to throw something out there about what just happened, and you have to tell me if I’m crazy.”

“You’re crazy,” Brianna says, “but go.”

“Is Mom in love with Frankie?”

It’s silent, except for Frankie’s wind chime that Grace still hasn’t taken down.

“Oh man,” says Brianna. “ _Is_ she?”

“You saw her in there. All ‘you’ll find your true love someday like I found my true love, _Frankie Bergstein_.’”

Grace tightens her grip on the ice cream tray to stop it from crashing to the floor.

“True. You know what? Sure. Sure. Why not? Far be it from this family to pass up on a single opportunity to go full batshit.”

“I think it’s kind of sweet,” Mallory says.

“Aw,” says Brianna contemplatively after a moment. “I guess it is. I mean, in an ‘if it’s true it means we’re the children of two late-in-life gays; just imagine the therapy in store’ kind of way.”

“It makes my heart hurt though. Now that Frankie’s gone.”

“I know, it’s a real ships-in-the-night situation. I think. Did I use that right? Usually I’m trying to avoid the other ships instead of crashing into them or whatever. Other ships are just so dumb. And by ships, I mean people.”

“You think Frankie would want to crash into Mom?” Then, in a whisper that makes Grace want to drive off the nearest bridge, Mallory adds, “ _Sapphically?_ ”

“Oh, Frankie would definitely go for it.”

“No way.”

“In 1997, Frankie literally described to me the exact way she would seduce Mom. And, okay, it was to punish me for stealing her stash and selling it to band nerds so I could buy Savage Garden tickets. She said, ‘I can be your worst nightmare’; I said, ‘Oh yeah? Prove it’; I was asking for it. But still. It got very detailed. Like, you’ve-definitely-thought-about-this-before detailed.”

“So you’re telling me that Frankie wanted to hate-fuck our mother?”

“I think now it would be more like making the tender, arthritic love of unlikely soulmates. But yeah.”

“God, I hate this conversation!”

“You started it!”

“Just because I wanted you to tell me if I was crazy! Not because I wanted you to tell me that!”

“You’re not crazy,” Brianna says. Her tone sobers. “About this, anyway. It’s sort of been in the air for awhile.”

“ _Right_?”

“Not in a way where it ever would have crossed my mind as a possibility, because the whole gay spouse swap concept is the stupidest thing that has ever happened in human history, and I’m counting frosted tips in that, but looking back ... I can see it. How it’s like she’s ...”

“Not all the way here without her?” Mallory says sadly.

“Yeah,” Brianna says.

They go quiet. Grace has to remind herself to breathe. She feels lightheaded and locked in her own body all at once.

“Does this make it weirder that Coyote and I almost kissed in his tiny house yesterday?” Mallory asks then.

“Jesus Christ,” Brianna groans.

Grace takes that as her cue to come out. It’s not like she can do what she wants to do, which is turn and leave the house and never come back. The girls jump at the sight of her, guilty. Something about the moment feels like they’re little again.

Grace gives them a smile and breezes right past them out onto the patio.

“Ice cream for everyone,” she announces, busting out her time-honored pretending-things-are-fine-in-front-of-company voice.

“I actually can’t have—”

“Yes, I got your fucking plums, Allison!” Grace thunders.

Bud and Coyote stare at her in open-mouthed shock.

Oh, damn it.

“Thank you,” Allison says tranquilly.

Grace forces a smile and sets the tray onto the table. “So lovely to have you all here in our home.” Shit. “My home.”

“Thanks for having us, Mom,” says Mallory, coming over to rub Grace’s shoulder.

Grace slips away from the touch. “Anytime.” Anytime, never again; tomato, tomahto. “You kids eat up. I’m just going to go grab a little drink.”


	4. The Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: when this fic began, it was supposed to be about Grace and Frankie fake couple-ing in order to give Grace an excuse to break up with Nick, and the somber backstory of Frankie briefly moving to Santa Fe was supposed to take like 500 words max. Instead it has become ... this? God help us all!
> 
> I promise Frankie will be back soon.

Once the kids have cleared out and taken their concerned puppy eyes with them, Grace pours herself another drink. It seems a shame not to.

She tells herself that she’s going to watch TV. Just watch TV, and finish this drink, and go to bed. And definitely not think about a single deluded thing her daughters said tonight.

Watching TV, finishing this drink, and going to bed somehow turns into opening her laptop and scrutinizing Frankie’s Facebook page with her new/old best friend vodka by her side.

Frankie’s profile picture used to be one of the two of them together, posing in front of the Vybrant sign in the living room. Grace had pestered her to change it for ages—it had been a sudden selfie attack on Frankie’s part, and definitely wasn’t a flattering angle—but like most things, Frankie hadn’t gotten around to it. Well, she has now. Her new picture is of her and Jacob. They look gorgeous together. It would appear that Jacob has no unflattering angles. Fucking god damn it.

Who (Grace takes a sip, or maybe a gulp) elaborately plans out how they would seduce someone they don’t even like? And in 1997, no less. Hadn’t they all had better things to do in 1997? Grace certainly had.

Frankie has posted 225 pictures since she got to Santa Fe. Most of those have been uploaded in the time since she and Grace stopped talking so much. Facebook is the new Grace, apparently. The most recent photo album is called ‘bok bok bok! not choy. this time.’. It’s full of pictures of chickens. She got the chickens. Frankie has been desperate for those damned chickens for the past year at least. Grace said over her dead body. But of course Prince Jacob said yes to chickens.

Jacob is really a very nice man. You’d have to be, to deserve Frankie.

But also (and Grace really doesn’t allow herself to think this enough), fuck him very much.

Which is, of course, what Frankie’s up to right now. Because that’s what Frankie does. For all of her free love sexual fluidity hippie bull crap, Frankie sleeps with men. She and Grace have that in common. You can’t just change a whole lifetime’s established tradition. (You can, however, change half a lifetime’s if your name is Robert or Sol.) If Frankie _did_ devise an elaborate Grace seduction scheme back in the era when velvet dresses didn’t seem like the worst idea, it was because she hated Grace. Not because she liked thinking about ... well, any of that.

And yes, Frankie is— _was_ handsy and kissy and occasionally doled out some very strange and specific compliments, but it wasn’t like she had ever expressed any interest in Grace like that. Well, all right, occasionally she’d done that too, but Frankie had only said those sorts of things to watch Grace squirm. To Frankie, touch comes easy; Grace has never been like that. In the days before their lives started over, Grace used to tense up around her, dreading the thought that she might become the recipient of the easy affection Frankie gave to Sol or the kids or Grace’s daughters. Not that Frankie had liked Grace then—hell no—but there was so much affection in Frankie Bergstein that sometimes it spilled over onto any innocent bystander. She was radiant, buoyant with it. Once, decades ago, Grace had gotten a paper cut while trying to read a roadmap on a Hanson-Bergstein road trip to Disneyland (a.k.a. hell on earth), and Frankie had taken her hand and cooed and kissed it without missing a beat, like she’d temporarily forgotten that Grace  was Grace, and just wanted to give her love to someone who needed it.

Never, never in a million years would Grace dreamed of having someone like that. Even if it was only for a little while.

Grace clicks over to the page with all of Frankie’s old profile pictures. Most of them are family shots that Sol doesn’t appear in until you get toward the bottom of the page. There are five, higher up, with Grace in them. In the earlier ones, Grace’s expressions are strained. In one of them, she’s actually mid-eyeroll. (“Why would you choose _that_ picture?” Grace remembers asking. “Because I look adorable,” Frankie had explained, “and you have beautiful whites-of-your-eyes.” “Oh, shut up,” Grace had said, unaccountably flattered.) But in the most recent one, the one that got ousted for the coupley photo with Jacob, Grace is actually smiling. Not prettily—Frankie hadn’t given her enough time to prepare for that—but even though her eyes are all squinty and her gums are showing, you can feel the happiness in the moment.

Grace considers the picture, trying to see it from a stranger’s perspective. She supposes she can see why farmers market vendors and police detectives and idiotic next-door neighbors think they’re married. They do look like a happy couple.

Grace has never been part of a happy couple before.

And (maybe she should have just one more drink), speaking of happy:

No one Grace has ever been romantically involved with has cared as much about Grace having good orgasms as Frankie has.

But that’s just what friendship is like when all of your friendships aren’t forged at the country club. It’s girlfriend stuff. Gwyneth Paltrow probably writes about it in that email newsletter that Frankie likes to print out and set on fire every few weeks. It’s perfectly normal.

It’s perfectly normal to thank your best friend for all your best orgasms.

Not out loud, of course. More ... inadvertently, in the moment, the way you’d thank God for something without meaning to. It makes sense that in the moment, your thoughts would dance to the person who helped you create the moment. It makes sense.

Maybe that was Frankie’s 1997 seduction plan. Maybe it was a long con. Make husbands fall in love. Divorce husbands. Become roommates. Forge unexpected and totally inconvenient emotional bond. Introduce Grace to vibrators and genuine human connection. Fall in love with a yam farmer and leave. Force Brianna to pick up the pieces of Grace’s shattered existence while Grace randomly weeps multiple times a day about the hippie chick that got away.

Boom. Vengeance.

Grace stares at the picture. The ugly-happy picture. Frankie’s leaning against Grace’s shoulder in it, her gray-brown curls half-devouring Grace’s face, and for a moment, Grace feels the warmth of Frankie’s head pressed against her. In a world where Jacob hadn’t come along, Frankie would be sitting next to her right now, leaning on her, flipping through channels and providing a drowsy commentary, and Grace would smile to herself and keep scrolling through Facebook and just savor the quiet feeling of being home, and not alone.

Maybe Frankie is sitting like that with Jacob now.

Or maybe—

Maybe Frankie is sitting just like Grace is now, hurting too. Maybe Grace can’t be the only one who feels like this. After all, they’ve both lost the same thing. Grace is no Frankie (is anyone?), but Frankie seems to like her. Even after all the ways Grace has been cruel and cold, on purpose sometimes and accidentally others, because doing anything else would mean admitting that her heart has been cracked open by a wonderful lunatic—still, Frankie likes her. Frankie likes her enough to want her to come visit, and interrupt her little love nest. It’s Grace who turned her down.

Grace takes an undignified swig. For mettle. Then she clicks on Frankie’s name on the chat menu and starts typing, ignoring the little admonitory voice in her head. She hits enter before she has time to talk herself out of it.

This is good. Communication is good. Frankie loves communication. To her it’s the Del Taco of human interaction styles.

_Please don’t think I don’t want to see you.  i do.  Very badly.  I just cant take seeing you there when I still wish you were here with me._

_xo  
_ _Grace_

After a moment’s thought, she adds:

_PS. Did you really describe to Brianna in great detail how you would seduce me in 1997? asking for a friend._

Yes. Good. Done.

 

+

 

When she wakes up the next morning, it’s with a sudden jolt of dread. And a terrible headache.

And God, an everything-ache. She realizes after a moment that she’s still on the sofa, her face smooshing yesterday’s makeup against a throw pillow. She can’t remember the last time she didn’t sleep in pajamas.

And she wrote Frankie that stupid mewling message.

Grace sits up abruptly, takes a few seconds to really regret that movement, and then reaches for her laptop; it rests benignly on the other side of the couch. It feels like it’s much farther away—in Los Angeles, maybe—but it’s worth the pain and effort under the circumstances. She grabs the laptop with a grunt that fortunately isn’t witnessed by anyone, then opens it.

Maybe Frankie won’t have seen the message. Maybe she’s left her phone at the grocery store or dropped it in a fountain. It certainly wouldn’t be the first, or twelfth, time.

No such luck. There’s a reply. A little _1_ in a red bubble hovers over the messages icon in the top corner of the screen, mocking her.

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. (“You call _that_ a deep breath?” Frankie said once, soon after they’d moved in together. “Oh brother. No wonder you’re so uptight. But don’t worry. I can fix this.” Then she tried to give Grace deep breathing lessons by putting her arms around her from the back, like some geriatric lesbian _Ghost_ reenactment from hell, until Grace finally did it right to placate her and escape.)

Grace exhales, and then she opens the message.

Frankie—queen of the endless ramble and the never-ending chain of bewildering emojis—has written only one thing in response to Grace’s mess. It isn’t even a word.

It’s a heart.

There’s a single little pink heart underneath Grace’s pathetic bubbles of blue typo-laden text.

“What the hell, Frankie?” she mutters.

 

+

 

Brianna and Mallory show up in the afternoon, contrite.

“Oh wow,” says Brianna when Grace answers the door. A ringing endorsement if ever there was one. Grace is wearing pajamas now, to make up for not sleeping in them, and tossed one of Frankie’s forgotten afghan blankets around her shoulders before getting off the couch. Looking like a functional human being, Grace reasons, is for people who didn’t have to spend last night listening to their own children speculate over having two alleged late-in-life gay parents.

“What was that?” Grace asks pointedly.

“Nothing,” Brianna yelps. Mallory steps on her foot, and Brianna throws in a very transparently rehearsed, “We’re sorry, we’re dumb, and you should never ever listen to anything we say.”

“Unless we were right,” Mallory jumps in. “In which case, we one hundred percent support you and we’re totally here to talk.”

“And not saying you do, but who could blame you if you _did_ have a thing for Frankie?” Brianna says. “She’s got that sexy-high-fantasy-priestess-meets-community-college-poetry-professor-who-will-always-compliment-your-haikus vibe going for her. And yes, saying this is many levels of disturbing to me since that woman is like my second mother, but I’m just trying to put myself in the shoes of a Frankie-digging person—which may or may not be your incredibly stylish shoes. That’s empathy, right?” she adds to Mallory, who rolls her eyes.

Grace considers them both. They smile hopefully back at her.

Then she shuts the door in their beautiful faces.

From outside, she can hear them muttering in panic to each other. Grace savors the moment.

After an appropriately excruciating amount of time has passed, she opens the door again.

“I just needed the satisfaction of doing that,” she explains.

“Totally understood,” says Mallory. Brianna salutes.

“You can come in, but no talking,” Grace adds, leaving the door open and letting them wander in behind her.

“Best. Day. _Ever_ ,” says Brianna.

 

+

 

“What does a heart mean?” Grace finds herself asking in the middle of a commercial break for some insipid reality show about competitive cupcake-baking. Mallory picked it out, probably in a twisted attempt to get Grace to start talking.

It’s apparently working. Damn it.

“This is your territory,” Brianna tells Mallory. “Go.”

“What do you mean, a heart?” Mallory says, turning to face Grace.

“One of those little emojis. If someone just sends you a heart ...”

“It means they love you,” Mallory says, with all the encouraging sweetness of a Disney princess.

Grace scoffs. “Or that they’re so busy with their own life that they can’t even be bothered to read what you wrote, and they’re just placating you with a generic symbol of affection.”

“Pretty sure that’s the ‘I was married to Robert Hanson for forty years’ talking,” says Mallory.

“Whereas Fr...other people,” Brianna says, “are the kind of people who really _mean_ their heart emojis.”

“Hmm,” says Grace, trying to sound like she doesn’t care much either way.

“Mom,” Brianna persists, “have you ever seen Fr...other people send an emoji they didn’t mean?”

Grace considers it. “I suppose you have a point,” she says.

“Thank you. Can we just start saying ‘Frankie’ now instead of pretending this is a hypothetical situation?”

“No,” Grace says crisply. “Watch the show.”

“This is an ad for Charmin,” Brianna says.

“Just watch it,” Mallory suggests in an undertone.

 

+

 

It’s easier to avoid the impulse to check her messages with her daughters around. Once they’ve gone, she makes it approximately twelve seconds before looking at her phone.

Still nothing else from Frankie.

And it’s not like Grace can be the one to bring words into the equation. Not after she already subjected Frankie to that drunken slew of word vomit. Not when certain people seem to be getting the idea that just because she loves Frankie and misses her, she’s turned into the world’s oldest pining teenager with the world’s most unfortunate crush.

Which she’s not, for the record.

That would be ridiculous.

 

+

 

Nick offers to cook her dinner the next evening. It’s as good a distraction as any. If nothing else, she figures her daughters could use a reminder of their mother’s heterosexuality.

She goes over to his place, only to find that he’s sitting in the living room sipping coffee and looking at his iPad while a chef toils away in the kitchen.

“Working hard, I see,” Grace observes dryly.

“Only the best for Grace Hanson,” Nick replies, standing up to greet her. “And believe me, you wouldn’t be getting the best from me. Not in the kitchen, anyway.”

She lets him kiss her cheek, and then maneuvers away slightly under the guise of setting her purse on the sofa.

He sits back down on the sofa and taps the cushion beside him, an invitation.

“I’m just going to use the restroom,” Grace says, giving him a smile and darting the hell away.

 

+

 

“You like that man,” she tells her reflection in the bathroom mirror firmly. “Not very much, obviously, because he’s insufferable, but you like him enough to use him for his cougar cub bod.”

Then, another thought occurs to her.

“And if you’ve bugged your bathroom, my daughter came up with that stupid phrase; I was using it ironically,” Grace hisses to the room at large. “And you deserved to hear that, you creep.”

 

+

 

When she goes back out into the living room, it’s to find Nick holding an envelope that he plucked from her purse. Charming.

“Grace,” he says, “Were you really going to attend a show by La Jolla’s #1 Gay Improv Group: Improvigaytion Sensation without me?”

“Yes, I was going to spare you,” Grace says, grabbing the tickets from him and tucking them back into her purse. “I don’t like you much, but I like you _that_ much.”

He laughs. “Well, there’s no way I’m not going to this.”

“Oh no you’re not. I’m only going to support Robert and Sol. And more importantly, my poor children who’ll have to witness this atrocity.”

“I’m going,” Nick insists, smiling and pulling her into his arms. “We’ll suffer together.”

His hands are firm on her waist, and suddenly Grace can’t breathe. Not in a dreamy way. In a ‘you’re lucky I don’t have any mace on me’ way. He smiles at her. It shouldn’t leave her so uncomfortable, being smiled at by a person who likes her. A person she likes.

_BullSHIT,_ says a voice in her head that sounds a lot like Frankie.

Grace tries to ignore it and focus on the handsome man who wants to kiss her. Kiss her, and get to know her family. Become a real part of her life. Isn’t that all anyone wants?

_BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT._

Oh, it’s true.

What is she doing here? She doesn’t like this person. She knows that she _should_ like this person, that he’s the sort of man that might have been whipped up in a lab for her somewhere and labeled _Just What Grace Hanson Deserves After Getting Dumped By Her Terrible Husband And Dating A Sexually Underwhelming Cannibal And Having A Fling With The Tragically Married Man Who Had Been Her Life’s Only Great Hope For Romance_. But that doesn’t change the fact that she just doesn’t want to be here. This saucy love-hate thing, being constantly on your toes and ready for the next verbal barb like a romance in an old movie—she would have enjoyed it once. Before.

“There’s someone else,” Grace blurts out, just before his lips meet hers.

Nick pulls back. “What?”

“For me. I’m sorry. I can’t keep doing this.” She shimmies out of his embrace and takes her purse from the sofa. The quicker she can get out of here, the more likely it is that he won’t call her on lying through her teeth.

His dark brows furrow. “But who—” Then his expression lightens with comprehension. “I didn’t know Frankie was back in town.”

Oh, for Christ’s sake.

“Frankie?” Grace repeats. Nick might not be cooking, but it suddenly feels like he just hit her over the head with a cast iron skillet. In fact, she’d prefer the skillet to what he just said.

“Yeah, last I’d heard from you, she was gone for good. So she came back, huh?”

“You think it’s _Frankie_?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because I’m dating _you_. A man.”

“Ehh, sexuality is fluid these days. Or at least we talk about it these days. I could tell you some stories about when I was younger. According to a Buzzfeed quiz I took awhile back, I’m pansexual.”

“Then stay out of my kitchen,” says Grace flatly.

Nick crosses his arms. Now he has the nerve to act smug. “You stole my romantic gesture and gave it to Frankie on our first date, Grace. I’m sorry that this is ending, but I get it. Frankie has dibs. Honestly, I was kind of glad when she left; it was the only way I could get you to actually pay any attention to me. Now I guess I can’t do anything besides wish you two the best.”

“Oh,” Grace says, flustered. “Well. Thank you. It is Frankie.” It’s convenient that he drew that conclusion. Never mind that her own children think the same thing. She’ll deal with that later. Still, this seems eerily like surrender coming from Mr. I Always Get What I Want. “Are you sure you aren’t going to challenge her to a duel or something?”

“Didn’t she just have a stroke? How much of a douchebag do you think I am?”

“You sued me so that I would see you,” Grace reminds him.

“Right,” says Nick obliviously. “I thought that was roguishly charming.”

“It wasn’t,” Grace says.

“But you went out with me,” he says, grinning.

“And now I’m leaving you for a woman,” Grace says. “And a hippie, at that.”

“Oh.” He frowns. “Well, okay then. It might be time to rethink some stuff.”

“It might indeed,” Grace says. “Goodbye, Nick.”

She waltzes down to her car in a state of triumph, and likes to think it’s the sort of moment that an Aretha Franklin song would play over if it was a scene in a movie. Once she’s inside, she means to start the car and drive right home.

But she can’t help it. She pulls out her phone. Opens her Facebook messages and presses her fingertip to Frankie’s name.

Still, there’s only that one reply. That stupid heart.


	5. The Mom Chicken

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my goodness, sorry for that epic wait! (Although, er, if you happen to also read my story The Best Of It, you know that was nothin'.) Life's become pesky and hurled a bunch of work my way this summer, so my crying-over-Grace-and-Frankie time became tragically limited. I am hoping to get the last three-ish chapters of this to you in the next, oh, century or so, or maybe even sooner than that!
> 
> Thank you to everyone for your truly lovely comments; I have cherished every one!

Grace goes to Robert and Sol's improv show alone.

Maybe ‘alone’ is a little much; she arrives to find the kids all there in the audience already, and a spot saved for her. But it’s disconcerting to walk in by herself. She’s still so used to going with Frankie to these sorts of things. Not having to remind the person next to you to keep your shoes on in a public place, or to grab their purse before leaving—it’s disorienting.

The show is exactly as obnoxious as she’d expected. At one point, everybody onstage is pretending to be a Kardashian trying to pile into a clown car. Frankie, connoisseur of the high school talent show, would have been in low standards heaven. Grace spends the whole time silently thanking God that she and Robert are no longer legally bound together. She survived the humiliation of him having a twenty-year gay affair, but this? There’s no coming back from this.

Still, it’s good to see him happy, and to see him and Sol acting like idiots together with a group of people that seems to love them. Grace has come to terms with the fact that upheaving their entire lives was for the best, but it’s nice to have a reminder right in front of her face every once in a while. Yes, it’s good to see Robert happy, and even better knowing that that happiness isn’t her responsibility anymore.

When the show ends, the auditorium is filled with riotous applause. Grace and the kids shuffle over onto the stage to compliment the performers. (“I was here the whole time,” is the stunning compliment that Brianna musters.)

Robert kisses Grace’s cheek, thanking her for coming. “I’m still not used to seeing you without Frankie.”

“Well, here I am,” Grace says. She puts on a smile. “Without Frankie.”

“And you’re doing all right in the house alone?” he asks, his brow furrowing.

“You know me, Robert,” Grace says. “I’m always all right.”

He gives her a worried look, and it must be contagious because then Sol glances her way with those puppy-dog-in-the-rain eyes of his. It doesn’t last for long, though; a group of their friends comes over to drown them in attention and flowers. (Which, flowers? For _that_?) She’s not used to seeing Robert with people she doesn’t have to bother to charm. It’s very refreshing.

She waves at the kids and slips out, and doesn’t have to double back thirty seconds later to search the auditorium for Frankie’s purse, which she knows she would have inexplicably found rows away from where they’d been sitting. It’s nice, having the freedom to leave when she wants to. Maybe this is where all those millennial think pieces are coming from, the ones about how it’s actually liberating to be unmarried at thirty. This light-as-air, untethered-to-anything sense. She could fly to Paris on a whim. She could go to the San Diego Museum of Art all day long and look at everything for as long as she wanted to in peaceful silence.

She goes home to her empty house.

 

+

 

The girls are coming over for breakfast the morning after the show. Grace is thankful for the opportunity to have something to do—a real hands-on task instead of sitting at the computer working.

(At the computer, it’s too easy to check your Facebook messages without realizing you’re doing it. Only to find that you haven’t gotten any new ones. And then you might type ‘WHAT IS WITH THE FUCKING HEART, FRANKIE??????’ in a fit of pique, try to delete it, and very nearly send it as a reply to a business email. Hypothetically.)

But making breakfast: that’s something Grace can do without teetering further downward to disaster. She slices fruit and arranges it carefully on a platter, then makes a stack of perfect blueberry pancakes. Grace Hanson has never subscribed to the bad first pancake rule; her first pancakes have a history of being resolutely flawless. And then, of course, she makes bacon. The kitchen smells wonderful, like a real lived-in house. Not to mention that it’s a nice change of pace to cook real bacon instead of the terrifying science experiment that is vegetarian bacon.

Though she wouldn’t mind having the vegetarian bacon back in the house, as long as the vegetarian came with it.

 

+

 

“What happened to Cougar Cub?” Mallory asks, sipping her coffee.

The three of them are sitting at the dining room table together, intermittently picking at the breakfast spread that Grace arranged. In addition to fruit salad, Grace treats herself to a pancake and a modest dollop of maple syrup on the side that would have made Frankie riot. It’s a good thing, really, that Frankie isn’t here. Trying to get Frankie onto a healthy diet? There’s no way _that_ wouldn’t shave a few years off of Grace’s life, and it’s not like she can afford that at her age.

“Now you’re saying it too?” Grace demands.

Mallory shrugs. “It’s kind of catchy.”

“It is,” Grace admits in an undertone.

Brianna smirks triumphantly.

“He wanted to get serious,” Grace says, “which made me want to get the hell out.”

“Respect,” says Brianna, holding up her mimosa glass.

“You’re engaged,” Mallory reminds her.

“Still.”

“Engaged?” Grace repeats, lifting her eyebrows.

“Not officially,” Brianna says, throwing a glare at Mallory. “It’s just that Barry and I have an understanding.”

“Oh?”

“And the understanding is that we’re going to hang out monogamously until we die. But we haven’t gotten into any of the wedding stuff yet. Don’t freak out.”

Motherly excitement (or maybe event-planning excitement; yes, that sounds more likely) is bubbling up in her. “But you _are_ planning to get married?”

“Calm down,” Brianna says. “I can see the organization lust awakening behind your eyes. It’s creepy.”

“We’re totally going to plan your wedding,” Mallory declares.

“Hell yes we are,” says Grace. She clinks her glass with Mallory’s coffee cup.

“Barf,” says Brianna. “Topic change, please. So Mom, how exactly did you dump the cub?”

“Oh, I just told a little white lie.” Grace sips her Bloody Mary casually. “I don’t know if he would have let it go otherwise.”

“What lie?” Brianna leans forward.

“Oh, nothing,” Grace says breezily. “That I had feelings for someone else, or something like that. Anything to motivate him to get out of the picture.”

“Fancy that,” Brianna says. Now she and Mallory are the ones making conspiratorial faces at each other. Damn it.

“So Mom,” Brianna goes on, resting her chin in her hand cheekily, “any more questions about certain emojis?”

“Unlike young people today,” Grace replies, “I don’t spend all of my time pondering the intricacies of tiny cartoon pictures.”

The text alert on her phone sings out. It’s really poor timing.

“You sure about that?” Brianna sasses.

“Yes,” Grace says firmly. She’s so distracted by Brianna’s general Brianna-ness that it takes her a second to register the text that’s lit up her lock screen.

It’s from Frankie.

 _R u home_ _?_ it says.

Grace feels her heart stop.

“Remember when Mom said emojis were insipid and she didn’t see the point, but then she discovered the martini emoji and started using it for short-hand whenever we’d text her about our problems because it was faster than typing out ‘Talking to you makes me need a fucking drink’?”

“How could I forget that heartwarming memory?”

Grace texts back with shaking fingers. _Yes. Why?_

There’s a knock at the front door.

Oh, God. Oh, _God._

“Who’s that?” Mallory’s voice sounds like it’s coming from another room. “Were you expecting someone?”

Grace ignores her, and gets up to walk to the door.

“Ooh, I hope it’s the Cub going all Fatal Attraction and refusing to take no for an answer.”

“You _hope that_?”

“For the drama, Mal. Duh.”

It takes maybe fifteen seconds to walk from the dining room table to the front door, but it feels longer. The house is brighter than usual, all of a sudden. All the everyday objects that she picked out so carefully and usually pays no attention to come to life to cheer her on, like people on the sidelines coaxing a runner to the finish line.

Grace places her fingers on the doorknob. With a shaking hand, she turns it and lets in the morning sunlight.

And there she is.

It’s Frankie. It’s _Frankie_ , dressed in the brightly colored equivalent of a burlap sack, wearing a necklace that defies comprehension, and holding ... an adorable stuffed snow leopard.

“Hey girl,” she says, holding it out to Grace like a bouquet of roses.

Grace feels like she’s floating. She takes the stuffed animal. It’s soft in her hands, and something about it makes her eyes sting. “What ... what are you doing here?”

“Hoping like hell you didn’t get another roommate,” says Frankie. The sunlight catches in her hair, making the silver shine. Grace had forgotten the exact color of her eyes. How could she have forgotten a thing like that?

“Damned right I didn’t,” Grace says, her voice almost steady.

Frankie smiles. It’s a tired smile—a smile that says _I’ve been through some shit in the last twenty-four hours_ —but Grace has never loved a smile more.

“What’s that?” Grace asks, noticing for the first time that there’s a kennel next to Frankie’s feet. The kennel has little noises coming out of it. Living noises.

“A chicken,” says Frankie. “We’re chicken people.”

“Okay,” says Grace.

“Okay?” Frankie repeats in shock, brightening.

“Sure,” says Grace. Right now, she’d happily welcome a hundred chickens. “We can be chicken people. Now, come in and have some tea.”

She wraps an arm around Frankie’s shoulders, meaning to lead her inside. Frankie turns it into a hug, wrapping her arms around Grace in one swift movement, and Grace isn’t ready to be so close to her. It steals her breath. Months alone and now Frankie is here. Frankie is touching her. Frankie’s hand is cupping the back of her head to pull her closer, the way you embrace someone you really cherish. Grace used to find it so swoon-worthy when men held women like that in movies. She tries to remember if she ever told Frankie about that.

Then Frankie pulls away, bending down to pick up the kennel. Grace feels vaguely like she’s just been struck by lightning.

“Her name is Grace,” Frankie explains happily as they walk inside, close but not touching anymore. “Obviously, this was before I knew she’d be part of a two-Grace household, so it’s going to get confusing.”

“We’ll change her name,” Grace suggests.

Frankie gasps. “No!”

“No?”

“You won’t say that once you see her. She is _such_ a Grace. There is no other name for this little lady. Here, look—” Frankie puts the kennel down and starts fiddling with its door.

“Frankie, don’t let a chicken in the house—you’re not letting a _chicken_ in our _house_ —”

But it’s too late.

The chicken pokes its startlingly salmon-pink head out of the kennel, then struts out curiously. It’s got golden blonde feathers. Grace supposes she can kind of see the resemblance. It might even be something of a compliment, in that weird Frankie way.

Frankie scoops the chicken up in her arms. “Grace,” she says, clearly talking to the chicken, “meet Grace.” She chuckles, pleased with herself.

“There’s a Mom chicken?” Brianna says from the table.

“There’s a Brianna!” Frankie cries, delighted. “Oh, and a Mallory—”

Frankie shoves the sentient bundle of feathers into Grace’s arms and rushes over to Grace’s daughters. The stuffed snow leopard falls to the floor.

“Frankie!” Grace yelps.

The chicken stares at Grace with its beady eyes.

“You know how she gets,” Grace mutters to the chicken.

The chicken gives her a ‘you bet I do’ look. Either that, or Grace is literally delirious from happiness.

Which honestly might be happening.

 

+

 

It’s a busy day – the boys come over once they get wind of Frankie’s return; Allison is with Bud, and Frankie loses it at the sight of the bump that is her impending grandchild. Grace usually balks at spontaneous social gatherings, but today, it’s not so bad. She’s just so glad to have Frankie here. This whole place seems to come back to life. There’s a singalong with Coyote playing accompanying guitar and everything.

It really is a happy gay house.

Happy house.

 

+

 

They aren’t alone until that night. Chicken Grace is out exploring the backyard; the patio doors are open, and Grace can hear her little rustlings and clucking sounds. It’s oddly soothing.

Frankie is sitting on the couch, a mug of tea in her hands. She doesn’t seem to be doing anything besides just … sitting.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Grace asks, coming closer. “Why you’re here?”

Frankie shrugs. “There’s not much to say.”

 _That’s a first,_ Grace would usually interject. Not right now, though. The air is too delicate between them. Instead, she just sits down on the sofa next to Frankie and waits.

“I just had to be here,” Frankie says after a moment. She sounds so serious. Grace isn’t used to it.

“With your family,” Grace says. The words don’t quite come out as the question they are.

“With my family,” Frankie agrees. After a moment, she reaches for Grace’s hand and squeezes it. Grace squeezes back.

Frankie’s knee is touching hers. Grace doesn’t know if she’s ever paid attention to Frankie’s knee before. At least not in a non-‘Oh God, is this a medical emergency? You know you shouldn’t try parkour!’ context.

It’s just that it’s strange, having someone here again after those months living alone. Who wouldn’t be a little thrown by the touch of strange new-old knees on the sofa where you figured you’d probably die alone one day?

“We’ve still got those episodes of Planet Earth II on the DVR,” Grace says, getting up from the couch.

Frankie gasps in delight. “Mother Earth as seen through the gaze of womankind, at last. That Jezebel interview with the producer—it changed me.”

“I know. You sent it to me five times.”

“Well, you hadn’t gotten back to me on it!”

“Put an episode on. I’ll make popcorn. But no butter! And only a dash of salt. Maybe half a dash.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Frankie grumbles. “Life is a barren wasteland. Joy is fleeting. Everybody dies. What’s the point in living a few years longer if they’re a few years without _butter_?”

“Calm down or we’re having celery sticks instead,” Grace orders.

“Plain popcorn, huzzah!” says Frankie, waving her fists in the air, making Grace laugh.


	6. The Gift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shorter chapter, but hopefully what it lacks in word count, it makes up in feels!

Frankie’s stuff arrives courtesy of movers a few days later. While Frankie’s chatting with the movers like they’ve known each other for years, Grace checks to make sure that everything arrived in order. Well. ‘In order’ is a generous term. She marvels in the familiar mess that’s swallowed the living room. It’s like Frankie’s soul exploded.

There’s a stack of Frankie’s paintings propped against the wall; Grace starts flipping through the canvases idly while Frankie gives one of the movers relationship advice.

Grace chuckles at a few featuring the current presidential cabinet that could give “Hitler’s Circumcision” a run for its money. They’re followed by a number of different chicken pictures. She’s stopped expecting anything _but_ chickens when she flips to a new one and gasps softly.

It’s Grace. Not Martini Vampire Grace. Not even a Grace that Grace herself could have flattered herself into believing in.

The Grace in the painting is smiling slightly, serene and giving as a goddess, her eyes kind and shining. She glows. The background of the painting is all warm hazy reds and golds and greens. Painting-Grace’s hand is holding an unseen partner’s, their fingers woven together by twining vines.

It’s the balloon.

There’s not a label that says it’s the balloon or anything. But it feels exactly like being there had. It puts a lump in Grace’s throat to see it.

She reaches forward and presses her finger lightly over the bottom corner of the canvas, the part where Frankie’s hand is. She traces the vines that join their fingers together.

“Oh, shit,” comes Frankie’s voice, surprising her. “You weren’t ever supposed to see that.”

“No, I like it,” Grace says, pulling her hand back. “It’s—it’s beautiful. Thank you.”

“Well, in that case,” says Frankie with a lame little laugh, “It’s for you. Happy all-the-holidays.”

Grace laughs too. There’s a nervous edge to it that she doesn’t understand. It’s like being given the moon and having a panic attack. Why can’t she just be thankful and moved and _normal_ , for Christ’s sake?

“What’s it called?” she asks.

Frankie folds her arms and considers the painting. “I don’t know yet.”

“You name your paintings before you paint them,” Grace says, surprised. “You said once that the best part of painting and motherhood is getting to name your masterpieces.”

“I was pissed about motherhood that day,” Frankie says. “And you can’t deny that Coyote and Nwabudike are epic names.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Grace says.

Frankie looks back at the painting, her forehead wrinkling pensively. She looks beautiful when she’s thinking about her work: sharp and serious, even elegant.

“It’ll come to me,” Frankie declares. She squeezes Grace’s shoulder, then turns her attention back to the new best friends the movers. “Oh, don’t go yet! Let me make you some kale loaf.”

“ _Don’t_ let her make you some kale loaf,” Grace says, and tries to act normal, to act casual. To act like a person who hasn’t just been given the most beautiful gift she’s ever received.

 

+

 

Before, Frankie sleeping out in her studio was something Grace cherished. An essential component to the preservation of her sanity.

Lately, it doesn’t feel like that. After the two of them spend a few minutes out on the patio saying goodnight to Chicken Grace (who now lives in the finest chicken coop Frankie could barter for at the farmer’s market), Frankie announces she’s off to bed, and it feels strange, like a spell being broken. Like a record-scratch sound ruining a perfect scene in a movie.

_Stay,_ Grace wants to say. There are empty bedrooms upstairs. It seems ridiculous for Frankie to leave the house every night. Then again, there’s not really a normal way to say ‘I know I more or less banished you from this house because you used to drive me crazy, but want to sleep next door to me instead of in an entirely different building?’.

So she keeps her mouth shut about it.

Frankie comes back inside one night after her departure; Grace looks up from reading on the couch.

“I found your favorite cardigan,” she says, holding it out. “It was on the sofa in the studio.”

“Oh,” Grace says, embarrassed. She tries not to show it. She takes the cardigan; their hands brush fleetingly. “Thank you.”

She waits in agony. If there’s one thing she knows for sure about Frankie, it’s that the woman boils over with questions at the slightest hint that Grace might have shown some human emotion. Taking sad naps in Frankie’s studio after Frankie moved? That’s a pathetic feelings goldmine.

But Frankie doesn’t press it, just gives Grace a little smile and then moves into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. She starts singing to herself, roughly to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, as she shimmies around the kitchen.

“ _A-chamomile and rooibos and peppermint and licorice and lemon-ginger and Sleepy Time and Lady Grey and all the tea, oh-weeee-oh-weEeeE-yum-yum-a-tea—”_

Grace watches her, absently hugging the cardigan to her chest. It isn’t until Frankie glances over her way that Grace remembers she’s supposed to be reading. She looks down at her book, and hopes to hell she’s not blushing.

Blushing.

God.

This is unbelievable. Her incomprehensible meltdown was supposed to check itself once Frankie came back. Being in the same room as Frankie was supposed to finally drive home, once and for all, just how insane Brianna and Mallory’s _theory_ is. And how insane Nick was for subscribing to it too. But instead—

“You want some?” Frankie asks.

“What?” Grace barks.

“Tea,” Frankie says, tilting her head in confusion.

“Oh,” Grace says, her heart thundering. “Right. Um, only if you promise not to sing first.”

“I think you know I can’t do that.” Frankie smirks.

It’s the same old smirk she’s smirked a thousand times. Never once before has Grace paid attention to the curve of Frankie’s lips.

“Peppermint, please!” Grace squeaks, with all the poise of one of those Harry Potter elves.

“Peppermint! You got it.” Frankie fetches a mug from the cupboard, and Grace doesn't run out the back door and drown herself in the ocean. At the moment, it feels like an accomplishment worth mentioning.

 

+

 

Once upon a time, right after the twins were born, Madison and Macklin stayed over to give Mallory a break, and Frankie built a blanket fort with them in the living room and watched Harry Potter movie after Harry Potter movie from inside that makeshift castle.

The three of them _ooh_ ed and _ahh_ ed and shouted at the screen while Grace sat on the sofa under the guise of working instead. It was hard to focus, though; she kept getting pulled into—well, not the movie, but the scene that was playing out in front of it, the fidgeting happy silhouettes behind one of those sheets that Frankie never bothered to fold right. Grace didn’t feel envious of Frankie’s ease with the children, like she had with Grandma Jean. Instead, watching Frankie with her grandchildren filled her with a bizarre feeling, an almost unfathomable tenderness.

Frankie didn’t owe Grace’s family anything, not really, but she treated those kids with such care. While they babbled on about things in the way that children did, she listened and asked solemn questions, and never talked down to them. Frankie never once busted out the vague ‘mmhmm’s and ‘oh yeah?’s that were Grace’s grandparenting lifesaver. And if Grace couldn’t be Fun Grandma, well, at least she shared her life with Fun Frankie, and so their home was a happy place, a place that the kids would be excited to come to instead of groaning and dragging their heels. She had thought before that they wouldn’t stand a chance against Grandpa Robert and Grandpa Sol.

She had used to marvel at how Robert would change around his grandchildren; her cold husband was suddenly gregarious and silly, overflowing with affection. She couldn’t help but resent it. He could be wonderful, it seemed, with everyone but her. He would put in the effort for everyone but her.

But with Frankie, it was different. Frankie was just as good to Grace as she was to the kids (albeit infinitely less mature). With Robert, Grace had always felt a terrible petty urge to go over to the children and hiss, _He’s tricking you. Really, he’s very emotionally withholding._ With Frankie, she just wanted to join the fan club. _I know. Isn’t she the greatest? Isn’t she neat?_

She really was. The absolute greatest.

Finally, trapped in Harry Potter limbo, Grace caved and peeked into the blanket fort.

‘Are you insane?’ she asked Frankie. ‘If you stay down there for much longer, you’re never going to be able to get up again.’

‘Ah ah ah. You’re forgetting one thing.’

‘Oh? What’s that?’

‘I’m a wizard, Gracie,’ Frankie growled in an unplaceable accent that made the children shriek with delight. She grabbed Grace’s hand and pulled her down into the fort, and Grace wound up nestled in a palace of bedding for hours, watching legendary actors of British stage and screen debase themselves for paychecks.

She griped and muttered about it a little, because that was what she did around Frankie, but it wasn’t all bad. She felt—curled up with Frankie’s arm looped through hers (Grace had trapped it there to stop Frankie from poking her in the arm and chanting _‘Don’t be a muggle, Grace. Muggle muggle muggle muggle ...’_ )—like grandparents were supposed to. They would catch each other’s eyes and smile when the kids said something funny, the glances like little promises: they would come back to that later, and laugh over it when Madison and Macklin weren’t there to have their feelings bruised. After awhile—they really were _very_ long movies—Frankie rested her head against Grace’s, and Grace didn’t move because there was no space for moving, and because it felt good. Like being a family. Like having a partner finally, finally, finally. Even if that partner was just her zany hippie roommate.

So yes, maybe she had noticed being close to Frankie before. But at the time, it hadn’t been a putting-the-pieces-together kind of noticing; you couldn’t notice something when it wasn’t even the faintest trace of a flicker of a possibility in your mind. All she had known back then was that resting there with Frankie, feeling so united and so seen, was a thing she wouldn’t mind holding onto, even if she had to watch endless hours of a plucky boy wizard to do it.

Well, God help her, she’s noticing now.

It’s terrifying, but not the most terrifying thing about all this. The most terrifying thing is trying to fall asleep at night. Thinking about the glowing nameless Grace in the painting, and Frankie too far away in the studio. Staring across the blackened room, where she knows the stuffed snow leopard is sitting on the dresser. It’s bad enough that she’s decorating with stuffed animals now—there’s no way around it, that’s so Grandma Jean—but even worse is the question that beats through her brain. The last time she felt like this, so fixated on how her life had veered hopelessly off track, was when Robert left her: back then, it had been, _How could this happen? How could this happen?_

Now, it’s different and the same. Better and worse. Worse because it's so much better.

_How could this happen? How could this happen?_

_Is Frankie noticing too?_  


	7. The Diary

_(Frankie presses record on her phone camera.)_

We meet again, Diary. Long time no talk.

Then again, you probably don’t need an update because of the whole smartphones-secretly-surveying-our-every-move thing. Shame on you, by the way. That is panopticom _pletely_ uncool.

Ooh, that was a good one. That’s definitely going on Twitter later.

What to say, what to say? Well, I’m back home with Grace, so that’s good. Not that Santa Fe wasn’t good, but this is home-good. It’s hard to compete with that. The gang at Del Taco was thrilled to see me again. And the yogurt shop crew? They were out of their minds. I felt like the Beyonce of La Jolla. Of course, because I’m a healthy eater now, I had to have a bean burrito _sin queso pero con mucha lechuga y tomate y cebolla_. (Sidenote: Bud finally showed me how to install Duolingo on my phone, hooray!) A few months of eating like this and I get why Grace is so uptight. I would murder somebody for a Cinnabun.

Not that she’s been so uptight lately. In fact, she’s been ... really very lovely since I got back.

Anyway. It’s not that healthy food is _so_ bad. I can dig a radish. It’s just that once you’ve had tater tots—once tater tots have really been a big part of your everyday life—well, radishes are never going to be first place in the food-that’s-round category. Not when you’re thinking about tater tots.

Even if radishes are what people should eat.

So, uh.

I haven’t really mentioned what I’m gonna tell you to anyone, so let’s just keep this between you, me, and the NSA.

Grace wrote me a Facebook message. And for once, it didn’t say ‘Why did you post that picture of us? I look awful. Take it down now.’ It said ... some really nice things. Dare I say it, some stuff that lent a little insight into the very fabric of her soul. And you know how she likes to pretend she doesn’t have one of those.

And she signed it ‘xo.’

Not that that matters. You know that every time she sent Puss Face and the country club squad a birthday card, she signed it ‘xo.’ It’s just what a woman like Grace does when she decides you’re her girl friend.

Er. Girl. Space. Friend. Two words. Forgive me if I slurred that a little. I _did_ have a stroke, you know.

Anyway. She always used to sign _my_ birthday cards, ‘Regards, Grace and Robert.’ I mean, I guess it was nice that she sent me a birthday card at all, what with her hating my guts and everything. Because you _know_ that Robert had nothing to with that card, even though I was _his_ business-partner-slash-secret-lover’s wife. But at the same time, did a single card ever have a cute animal in a party hat on it? No. Talk about not knowing your audience.

I’m verbally traipsing away from the original point, aren’t I?

I don’t know. I saw that ‘xo’ and the words that came in front of it and I... I just knew that I had to come back. It was one thing if she was better off without me—she used to be really big on beating that dead horse, you know; the ‘I’d be better off without you, Frankie’ dead horse—but I could just see her, sitting alone. Drinking alone. And then she sent me these words and I knew that she felt as shitty as I did.

So I did it.

Jacob was really understanding, of course. He said he had suspected it would go that way for awhile. He actually apologized when we broke things off. He said he was sorry for underestimating what Grace meant to me. No way around it: the guy is a prince. A prince of root vegetables. He’s gonna make some girl very happy one day.

But that girl just couldn’t be me.

So now I’m back, and we can go back to normal. Grace and Frankie, at it again! ... And by ‘it’, I mean taking the world of vaginal stimulation for seniors by storm. Being legendary platonic friends. That sort of thing.

I don’t know why I just said ‘platonic.’

Platonic. Capital P. Of or pertaining to the philosopher Plato. Probably. Grace and I are very philosophical. You have to be, in our line of work.

I’d like to state for the record that everything I just said makes sense. And if it didn’t, I’ll just remind you, once again, that I had a fucking stroke.

Goodbye, diary. Smell you later, NSA.

 

_(Frankie stops recording.)_

_(...)_

_(And then starts recording again.)_

 

... Well, there’s one more thing.

It would appear that Brianna told Grace about a certain vengeance-fueled totally normal seduction scheme I concocted re: Grace back in the 90s. I was really hoping Brianna’d take _that_ nightmare fuel to the grave with her. Grace is exactly the sort of person who wouldn’t understand the point in being ready to seduce your nemesis, should the need ever arise.

Never mind that that’s just what she was doing with that Nick guy—who no longer seems to be around, thank God. I had no idea what I was going to do to get rid of that smooth-talking middle-aged 50 Shades of Grey escapee. Probably put Nair in his shampoo. I know there’s no beating _this_ head of hair, but can you blame me if I don’t like competition?

... For my hair?

Anyway. Did I used to look at Grace occasionally while we were stuck at endless boring-ass restaurant double dates or fundraisers or office parties at the firm and imagine how I would make those panties drop? Sure! But who doesn’t idly plan out how they’d seduce their worst enemy? That’s just a survival tactic, plain and simple.

I’ve gotten a little rustier at it with age. My seduction plan for Paul Ryan: give him a swift kick in the nards or ten and tell him he’ll never be as beautiful as Patrick Dempsey, so he might as well jump off a cliff and leave this nation’s poor in peace.

My plan for Grace had more steps.

Technically, she just asked me to confirm or deny whether said plan exists. I don’t know why I couldn’t just write back to her about it. I never used to worry about talking about her vagina before. Hell, it was one of my favorite conversation pieces. That and Ruby on Great British Bake-Off. Hashtag Team Ruby For Life, Hashtag Ruby Was Robbed, Hashtag Boo Frances Boo, Hashtag I’m Ashamed To Share A Name With You.

Fun fact: Ruby is bisexual. And she’s got mad Twitter game.

Grace, on the other hand? Most definitely not bisexual. Have you _seen_ Grace?

That’s a dumb question. Obviously you have. You took all the selfies of us. Sometimes I forget your boundless powers, you little Renaissance machine.

So you know what I mean. She’s as straight as the stick up her butt. She’d start a petition to put negative numbers on the Kinsey scale because zero leaves a little too much wiggle room. She probably wouldn’t date a man with long hair because even that’s just a little too gay, even if that man was Tarzan. Or Yanni.

She won’t even admit that Kate Winslet is fine as shit. Yes, Diary. I regret to inform you that it’s. That. Bad. When we watched The Dressmaker many moons ago and I provided the appropriate commentary (sidenote: human desirability has nowhere to go but down after Kate Winslet in The Dressmaker), the best she could do was say that Kate “carries herself well” and “has good bone structure.” Pfffffft.

I told her there was nothing wrong with admitting you wanted to go to town on Kate Winslet. You can imagine how she took that one. ‘Oh, is everybody gay now? Is there something in the water? Yet another reason to stick to vodka.’

So, you see why I’m in a pickle about this whole ‘did you tell Brianna how you’d seduce me in 1997?’ inquiry. It’s very un-Grace of her to poke that sexually fluid sleeping dragon.

I should just tell her. Why wouldn’t I tell her? Telling Grace things that make her cringe is my specialty.

I keep going easy on her.

I found her sweater in here, you know; it was kind of tucked in between the couch cushions. She got all flustered when I gave it back to her, but did I demand answers? No, I did not. So now I just get to fester in uncertainty until the end of time. No big deal. No worries. This tact thing is really working out for me.

Before, she always refused to hang out in here for prolonged periods of time. Apparently, I’m not to be trusted when it comes to responsible food ownership. Just because she sat down on the couch and got an ass full of burrito one time. _One time._ That’s Grace for ya. Something goes wrong once, and she’s out of there for life.

But she was in here while I was gone.

Maybe she always just wanted the space for herself and could finally take it without the fear of unexpected burritos. It’s a pretty kickass nap palace.

Or maybe ...

 

_(A long stretch of quiet.)_

 

Let the record state that I, Frankie Bergstein, am not in romantic or sexual love with Grace Hanson.

Because if I was, that would change everything. And there’s only so much change a pair of septuagenarians can take, no matter how full of vim and vigor and vibrator visions they are.

 

_(Frankie stops recording.)_

_(...)_

_(And starts again.)_

 

Also, if Grace Hanson wasn’t in love right back, it would fucking wreck me. And I can’t go through that twice.

So, uh. Bye for real, Diary. Eat my shorts, NSA.

 

_(Frankie stops recording. But only after giving the camera the middle finger.)_


	8. The Plan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to thank all of you for sticking with this through that ridiculously long pause. (Gosh darn life responsibilities and total lack of writing energy due to said life responsibilities!) There will be one more chapter after this one, and it’s like 80% done and was originally supposed to be lumped in with this one. I solemnly swear you’ll see it soon!
> 
> I would also like to thank New Girl, for first acknowledging the seductive power of Rusted Root. I think [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPbg_FtQ_wg) might truly be my favorite scene in all of television.

“Frankie, what are you doing over there?”

Frankie is hovering just outside the kitchen. Grace can hear her breathing, and see flyaway strands of hair sneaking around the corner. Frankie definitely doesn’t have what it takes to be a spy. She only made it through two and a half episodes when they tried to watch The Americans.

Grace, on the other hand (she’s always thought), could cut it as a spy.

“Frankie?” Grace tries again.

“Have you ever _really_ looked at this wall?” Frankie demands.

“Oh, God. Are you stoned already? We agreed you were going to cut down on that.”

Apparently that’s enough to spur Frankie into action. She leaves her fascinating wall behind, striding into the kitchen. She pulls out a half a grapefruit from the fridge and a spoon from the dishwasher. She doesn’t even sprinkle (which is to say, douse) it with sugar. Just takes a seat next to Grace at the breakfast bar and starts eating.

“I did,” Frankie says after a few minutes of grapefruit-eating silence.

“Get stoned?” Grace asks absently, skimming the news app on her phone. She sips her coffee.

“Tell Brianna how I would seduce you in 1997.”

Grace chokes on her coffee. She tries to do it gracefully. “Oh?” she finally says.

“She stole my weed. I needed a swift and brutal revenge. Do you want to hear what my plan was?”

“No!” Grace says, holding her hands up like the action will somehow prevent her from being scarred for life by this knowledge.

That’s right. Scarred.

Frankie shrugs. “Okay, I’ll tell you some other time.”

“I don’t need to hear ... any of that,” Grace says. “Ever.”

She chances a glance at Frankie. Frankie doesn’t look at all like Grace had expected her to; her face is full of ... worry? But when she catches Grace looking, she transforms.

“I’m gonna tell ya anyway,” she says, classic Frankie again. She leans an elbow on the table and gazes upward, apparently regaling the gods with her genius. “It would be a beautiful sunlit morning.”

“Ah,” says Grace. “A morning seduction.”

Apparently this is happening. She might as well deadpan her way through it.

“You’d need to be well rested for what I’d have on the agenda,” Frankie says.

Grace rolls her eyes. That’s what you do when you’re being told nonsense you’re not at all interested in.

Frankie continues staring idyllically into the distance. “‘Send Me On My Way’ by Rusted Root would be playing.”

Grace scoffs. “Then you would have been seducing alone.”

“Oh, we’ll see.”

“We will?”

“We _would_ see,” Frankie corrects quickly. “In the alternate universe where you and I stayed foes and I was left no choice but to fell you with my yonic superpowers. But fortunately, a glorious friendship blossomed between us. And it’s common knowledge that there’s no reason to seduce your friends.”

They stare at each other. Their chairs are too damned close together. Frankie’s elbow isn’t touching hers, not quite, but Grace can’t help suspecting that if any accidental elbow-brushing does occur, the whole beach house will burn down from the awkwardness.

“That is,” Frankie adds with an unconvincing laugh, “unless you’re our idiot ex-husbands, but what do they know?”

“Nothing,” Grace says. “They know nothing.”

“They know improv,” Frankie says mercifully.

“So worse than nothing,” Grace says.

Frankie jumps out of her chair. Her elbow misses Grace’s completely. “They’re coming over this weekend, by the way. I was so bummed about missing their improv show that they agreed to put on a mini repeat performance just for me! The kids are all coming too. Brianna said her attendance will cost me five hundred bucks an hour, but joke’s on her. I spent all my cash on patterns for chicken sweaters.”

“So that’s what that Evite was about,” says Grace, trying to remember how to be a normal woman having breakfast. “I knew I was avoiding it for a good reason. And why did you send me an Evite to my own house?”

“It’s called manners, Grace.”

“I didn’t realize you were the expert. Is seducing someone with terrible hippie music manners, too?” Yes. That’s good. Talking about it is good. Talking about it makes it into nothing but a joke.

“It was a hate-fuck,” says Frankie. “What says sexual vengeance better than ‘I’ll make you come to music you pretend to despise’?”

Maybe talking about it is bad.

Frankie seems to realize as much as soon as the words are out of her mouth. They stare at each other, deer in the headlights style.

In Grace’s case, the headlights are her daughters and Nick and all of this damned _noticing_. But what’s got Frankie frozen?

“I have to shower,” says Frankie then. She tosses her spoon into the sink with a clang.

“I have to ...” begins Grace—but there’s no point. Frankie has already darted right out of the room. Grace is always shocked at how much speed is left in that woman when there’s something worth running away from.

“... die immediately,” Grace finishes, groaning. She leans back in her chair to stare up at the unsympathetic ceiling.

 

+

 

It’s possible that Grace looks up the Rusted Root song.

She blames boredom. She and Frankie are supposed to be headed to the grocery store to pick up some snacks for tomorrow’s improv home invasion, but Frankie lost her homemade canvas shopping bags (which are covered in glitter and puff painted slogans like _PLASTIC IS THE NEW VOLDEMORT_ ) and is ransacking the house for them. Because it’s 2017, Grace turns to her phone to fill the waiting lull.

The song is, Grace admits to herself, pretty catchy, in a ‘they didn’t know better, it was the 90s’ way.

But as a seduction anthem?

Frankie is bonkers.

Which should come as no surprise. Of course Frankie is bonkers. Frankie looks at aspects of the world that normal people would find appealing and decides that they need more fringe and feathers. It’s a fundamental aspect of her personality. Why should that surprise Grace? Why would Frankie know how to effectively seduce her? That doesn’t exactly fall under the traditional best friend list of duties.

And yet ever since she heard Brianna mention it, a part of Grace has been so--

“I got ‘em,” Frankie declares, clambering into the car.

Then she realizes what’s playing.

“Hah!” Frankie cries victoriously, waving a glittery shopping bag that says _YOUR PLASTIC CAN’T SIT WITH US_ in Grace’s face.

“I was morbidly curious,” Grace says, keeping her tone measured.

“My intentions exactly.” Frankie wriggles her eyebrows.

Grace snorts. “Why would you pick a hippie anthem to seduce me with? Isn’t seduction all about knowing your audience?”

“It was playing in a restaurant when we all went out to dinner once.”

“A restaurant you and Sol made us suffer through,” Grace says, struck by the fuzzy memory of a place where they’d all sat on the floor in beanbag chairs.

“You tapped your foot along to it. I thought, ‘The ice queen has got some rhythm after all.’”

“You were watching my feet?” The thought of Frankie paying attention to her all those years ago, and in a way that wasn’t totally fueled by mocking how shallow and frivolous she was, makes Grace feel oddly lightheaded.

“They’re good feet,” Frankie says. “Tragically constrained at every turn by the vile foot corset that is the high heel, but good all the same.”

“Maybe I was tapping my foot because I was bored out of my mind.”

“Nah. You were feeling the beat. That’s exactly the key to a good Grace Hanson seduction: get her to loosen up and enjoy herself for once.”

Maybe Frankie isn’t so bonkers after all.

“I enjoy myself plenty,” Grace says defensively. It’s at least mostly true.

“Yeah, now that I’ve been working on you for the past few years. And besides, I was right, wasn’t I? Back when the sexy stuff got better between you and Guy, it all started with a dance. You told me.”

“It was a very sensual dance,” Grace says. “Not a granola hoedown.”

“Some might call the hoedown the most sensual kind of dance,” Frankie speculates. “What with all the hos. Getting down. Which would be the next stage of the plan, bee-tee-dubs.”

“You are a ridiculous person,” Grace tells her, and finally takes the car out of park.

“Point is,” says Frankie as they pull out of the driveway, “I called it twenty years in advance, baby. The way to a Grace’s hoo-ha is through cha-cha.”

“Well, whoop de doo. Congratulations on anticipating the desires of my hoo-ha.”

She got it wrong, she realizes a split second too late. The remark that had sounded blase and funny in her head comes out … strange. Too … well, too _something_.

The click of the turn signal grates against her bones. The song plays on, mocking her.

Mocking them.

“We don’t have to listen to this,” Frankie says quickly.

“Thank God,” Grace says; her usual sarcasm levels are eerily depleted. She lunges for the car radio, turning the volume way up.

_Take! Me! Down into your paradise! Don’t! Be! Scared ‘cause I’m your body type!_ contributes the radio.

Grace keeps her eyes on the god damned road.

“How about some NPR?” she says, reaching forward to change the station.

“Terry Gross is bae,” Frankie declares frenziedly.

“Doesn’t she have a husband?” Grace flounders.

“No, _bae_ —Neat. Terry Gross is neat.”

“So neat,” Grace agrees emphatically.

They drive on in silence, while Terry Gross interviews Peggy Orenstein about the importance of female sexuality.

Which, to two entrepreneurs in the vibrator business, shouldn’t be awkward at all.

 

+

 

These days, Grace finds herself thankful for classic Frankie foibles. Whereas once they might have inspired her to implore God to kill her on the spot, now they give her something to pay attention to about Frankie that isn’t inconveniently fascinating. Feeling exasperated with Frankie is a cherished relic of her former sanity, and she’s resolved to savor it accordingly.

“I told you to grab the list before we left the house.” They’re at Trader Joe’s now, and they’re supposed to be getting snacks. Frankie has been grabbing things at random since they came in, which is exactly the sort of behavior that led to the institution of the list in their household. Grace already knows that no one at the family get-together is going to go for the beet chips, which Frankie only picked up because they say DROP’N MAD BEETS on the bag in big letters and it made her giggle.

Frankie groans. “You tell me to do a lot of things. Can you blame me if eventually I drop the ball? I reorganized the kitchen cabinets.”

“Which I didn’t ask you to do, and now I can’t find anything. What the hell organizational system was that? Dare I ask?”

“By degree of how much I like the stuff. Duh.”

“How helpful.”

“Oh, wait! Last night I took a picture of the list in case we forgot it. Past Frankie saves the day again, hurrah! Grab my phone out of my purse.”

Grace obediently fishes through Frankie’s purse, finding the phone underneath a bunch of loose tissues and a fidget spinner.

“Video diarying again?” Grace observes once she’s scrolled to the bottom of Frankie’s photos.

Frankie snatches the phone out of Grace’s hands. Her armful of groceries goes tumbling to the floor. The mad beets get … well, dropped.

“Jesus, Frankie!” Grace cries, and tries not to read into that one. So what if Frankie doesn’t want Grace to know what she talked about in her video diary? It’s probably because Frankie ‘fessed up about sneaking cornucopias of junk food and is trying to avoid the nutrition-induced wrath of Grace.

“A woman’s phone is her own private business,” Frankie says with a lofty hair toss.

“So, uh,” says Grace, trying to bring the moment back to normalcy, “you’ve been googling ‘how to get my roommate to chill the fuck out’ again?”

“Uh,” say Frankie, “yeah.”

“A tip,” says Grace. “Forgetting the shopping list is not how.”

“Noted,” says Frankie, tucking her phone back into her purse.

A nice twenty-something guy with a terrible man bun picks up their scattered groceries and offers them his still-empty shopping cart.

Frankie, of course, thanks him effusively. Maybe too effusively. Like maybe she’s too glad of the distraction. Or maybe Grace is going well and truly insane. “You’re our shopping fairy godfather!”

“No problem,” says Man Bun affably. “Today’s your lucky day.”

“It sure is,” Grace deadpans.

 

+

 

“Oh my God, I’m so happy to see you two back here together again,” says the cashier at the checkout counter. Her nametag reads ‘Kelsey.’ As she starts sliding items across the counter, she chatters. “You’re my favorite lesbians who shop here. Don’t tell Priya and Alberta.”

“I can’t believe you just turned your back on Pralberta like that,” Frankie says, gasping. “Bold move, sister.”

“And also, we’re not lesbians,” Grace adds, because apparently it’s always up to her to do the heterosexual heavy lifting.

“We’re platonic domestic-and-business partners,” Frankie adds. “Like you do.”

Kelsey frowns. “Really? You haven’t been together for like fifty years?”

“No,” Grace says flatly.

“But you’re so good at chastising her about her eating habits and staring at her like she’s, like, only the most beautiful entity who’s ever lived,” marvels Kelsey to Grace.

“I don’t do that second thing,” Grace tells Frankie. “I have never done that second thing.”

“She’s just marveling at my awe-inspiring beauty in a friendly way,” Frankie says. Is it just Grace, or does her delivery lack its usual conviction? “Were you not here on the day that I rapped The Saga of Grace And Frankie, featuring such gems as Our Husbands Are Gay But It’ll Be Okay Parentheses Eventual-lay?”

“No,” says Kelsey, gasping in awe. “It sounds amazing, though.”

“Maybe I should schedule a repeat performance,” Frankie muses.

“I’ll be washing my hair that day,” says Grace.

“Have you _thought_ about being lesbians?” Kelsey goes on, totally unbothered, while she keeps on ringing up their items. “Because I really think you’d be good at it. You’re literally the cutest couple I’ve ever seen, and once I saw Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard when I went to brunch with my ex-boyfriend’s aunt. Long story, by the way. I so don’t want to talk about it.”

“Kristen and Dax,” says Grace dryly. “High praise.”

“It’s not low praise,” Frankie says. “Did you see them blessing the rains down in Africa on YouTube? Talk about relationship goals.”

“Then again,” Kelsey says, scanning the beet chips, “what truer love is there than female friendship, you know?”

“ _Exactly_ ,” says Grace, with such conviction that it makes the guy behind them in line jump in shock and drop his hummus.

Whoops.

 

+

 

It’s true enough, Grace thinks later.

She washes the dishes after supper, staring out at the patio. Frankie is down on her hands and knees, creating an elaborate pattern of greens from tonight’s salad for Chicken Grace to peck at. Her hair dances slightly in the evening breeze. She keeps making soft clucking sounds.

Frankie looks up and catches Grace watching.

Grace reminds herself that there’s no reason she shouldn’t be watching. The woman is designing a kale obstacle course for a chicken, for Christ’s sake. That merits some bemused attention. So she waves hello with a pink dish glove-clad hand.

Frankie waves back, her mouth curling in a smile. Grace’s stomach flops. She can’t tell if the feeling is happy or sad.

Female friendship is a powerful thing. Certainly powerful enough to be the reason Grace feels a  vaguely homicidal resentment toward the modest, everyday distances between her and Frankie. Sitting next to someone in the car or on the sofa with a foot of space between you isn’t necessarily supposed to make you feel like you might die or murder if you don’t close that gap, but if you’re a female and they’re a female and you’re friends? Well, that’s a whole different ballpark. Women understand that now. There are movie franchises about it. That whole Ghostbusters debacle. And wasn’t there a book series about pants that was probably along the same _girl power, best friends forever_ lines? Grace remembers those sitting on Mallory’s shelves. Brianna would always make fun of her sister for reading children’s books late into her teens.

Grace and Frankie don’t have to mail each other pants. They live in the same house. It would be a total waste of postage. Not to mention they would never agree on a pair of pants. But the spirit behind the thing is the same. When it’s your best friend, you want to be so close to them that you’re overlapping. No distance between you at all.

The pants weren’t a sex thing. Grace is pretty sure.

And neither is this!

Keep your friends close. That’s part of the saying, right? So she’s probably just … keeping Frankie … close ...

“Oh, hell,” Grace mutters to herself once Frankie looks back down at Chicken Grace again.

On the plus side, there’s no one with more experience in the fine art of living with somebody whose love you’ll never have the way you want it. She’s been training for this her whole damn life.

 


	9. The Truth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my goodness, it's a freakin' miracle! I apologize for being so, so bad at balancing my to-do list -- but here, at last, is the final chapter of this saga! Thank you so much to this fandom for being so generous and thoughtful and generally great. It's been a blast! :)

****“This is like Whose Line Is It Anyway but even sadder,” Brianna marvels under her breath the next night. Operation Bring Improv Hell To The Beach House is in full swing.

“The only way I’m volunteering for audience participation is if we’re volunteering to be shot in the face,” Grace mutters back.

Brianna cackles.

The living room furniture has been moved all around; all of the seating is now pointed toward the far side of the room, which is tonight’s stage. Grace has, thus far, blessedly managed to avoid that area. She, Brianna, and very pregnant Allison have stayed put on the couch. Mallory hasn’t been so lucky. She’s been a good sport, though. She and Coyote keep grinning radiantly at each other in the midst of the madness. Grace wonders how many love connections can emerge between two families before it officially becomes somehow incestuous.

Frankie raises her hand with gusto every time Sol or Robert asks for a volunteer. Right now, she, Coyote, Bud, Sol, and Robert are partaking in the insanity. Grumpy Cat is getting married to Rush Limbaugh. Officiated by the Spice Girls. In the middle of a tornado. Everyone can only speak in rhyming couplets. Grace has never really embraced the term ‘hot mess’ until tonight. Sometimes, no other descriptor will do.

Still, it’s good to see Frankie so happy, shining with excitement. At times like this, Grace can really believe that Frankie hasn’t lost anything priceless by leaving Jacob behind.

“Thank God Barry was busy tonight,” Brianna says in Grace’s ear. “He would so be up in the middle of that ish, and then who knows if I’d ever be able to view him as a viable sexual partner ever again? Admit it: today is the day you’ve been the most relieved about divorcing Dad.”

“Hmm?” Grace says, watching Frankie meow moodily.

“Oh, nothing,” Brianna says with a put-upon sigh. “If you’re not up for being the one judgy old Muppet guy to my other judgy old Muppet guy, I’ll just shut up and let you enjoy this fine at-home theatre experience. Hey, do those judgy Muppet guys have names?”

During intermission, Frankie drags Sol out to her art studio. She’s been working on a new painting to welcome Bud and Allison’s baby into the world, and she insists that Sol’s opinion is the one she trusts most on the matter, on account of him being her co-grandparent.

In Sol’s absence, Robert perches on the couch arm beside Grace. He’s got a little plate of those beet chips and carrot sticks. Sol’s already done more to turn his diet around than Grace managed in forty years.

“Sol turned me onto them,” he explains off Grace’s look. “They’re not bad.” He holds the plate out to Grace.

“I’ll let you enjoy how not-bad they are on your own,” Grace says. She takes a carrot stick.

“Fair enough. Thank you,” he adds, “for sacrificing your home to this madness.”

“You’re welcome,” Grace says, pleased that he’s acknowledged her suffering. “At least it’s making Frankie happy.”

“Your priority in all things,” Robert jokes. Grace smiles wryly, but can’t seem to find an answer. Robert doesn’t notice anything, just shifts his attention to the kids.

She listens too for a little while as Bud and Allison talk about their adventures in setting up the baby’s nursery.

“I was helping put the crib together at first,” Allison explains dolefully, “but the hammer fell on my fingers. This one’s broken.”

“You hammered your fingers?” Coyote says, his brow furrowing.

“No,” says Allison. “The hammer fell on my fingers.”

“From … where?” Brianna asks, to no answer.

Meanwhile Allison holds up her bandaged fingers as evidence, and Bud kisses them gently. Allison smiles at him, her eyes soft and full of love. It sends a pang to Grace’s heart. They’re lucky to have so many happy years ahead of them. That is, assuming Allison stays away from all building tools. Maybe just all objects in general.

When Robert starts rumbling about intermission going on for long enough, Grace goes out to usher Sol and Frankie back in. She appreciates a moment outside alone in the cool evening air. She loves her family, but she still can’t shake the uncomfortable sense that she might lose it in front of them at any second, or the even more agonizing sense that they’re all still waiting for it to happen.

Fucking feelings. What did Grace ever do to deserve them?

The door to Frankie’s studio is left open a crack. Grace reaches out to push it open.

“I get it,” Frankie says.

Grace draws her hand back.

“That I was Posh Spice?” Sol asks. “Thank God. No one else picked up on it at all, and I thought I was making it _very_ obvious.”

“No. What you did. I get it.”

“You mean the rapping angel bit?”

“Leaving me for Robert.”

“Oh,” Sol says quietly. “That.”

 _Go back inside,_ says a voice in Grace’s head. _This is none of your business._

Another, much more pathetic voice counters, _But what if it is?_

And so she stays, hovering there outside just like she did that awful night after Frankie’s stroke and their argument. Knowing Frankie was right inside and yet might as well have been in Santa Fe already had hurt so badly.

Now, on the precipice of whatever might be said next, Grace feels even more than she did that night. Not more pain, necessarily. Just more.

“Why are you saying this now?” Sol asks.

“Because, I ...” Frankie goes quiet. Then: “I loved it in Santa Fe. I really loved it. The vegan meatballs alone—”

“I can imagine.”

“You really can’t. Don’t kid yourself. And I loved Jacob. I did. He was kind, and funny, and he got me, and we were good together. But I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be here.”

“With the kids.”

“With Grace.”

With Grace.

With _Grace_.

Grace has hoped. Even suspected. But to hear Frankie say it out loud--

“Oh,” says Sol. Grace can just picture him, eyes big with shock.

Frankie sighs. “All the time in my head, it was, ‘What would Grace say?’ or ‘I’ve gotta tell Grace about this.’ ‘Grace would love this.’ ‘Grace would hate that.’ ‘I hope Grace isn’t working too much.’ ‘I hope Grace isn’t drinking too much.’ ‘I hope Grace lets herself eat something that doesn’t taste like cardboard or an angry lawn every once in awhile.’ It was like being haunted by the world’s most beautiful, neurotic ghost. I started waking up in the morning feeling so _sad_ knowing I wouldn’t see her that day, or even hear from her.”

“I thought you would keep in touch all the time,” Sol says, confused.

“So did I. We did at first. But it just ... it got too hard. And there was no end in sight, you know? It wasn’t like the suffering had an expiration date. And maybe it’d be one thing if we were younger; maybe then I would have stuck it out and waited to get happy again. But it’s different when you know you’ve only got so much time left. I want to spend it with her. My life is with her. And so I get how you felt, and why you had to leave even though you loved me. I did the same thing to Jacob.” Frankie laughs darkly. “How’s that for karma? I became the thing that nearly broke my spirit.”

“To be fair,” says Sol kindly, “you hadn’t been married for forty years to Jacob.”

“Yes,” says Frankie, “because I’m not a duplicitous super-asshole.”

“But if I hadn’t been that duplicitous super-asshole,” Sol says, “there would be no Grace-and-Frankie.”

“You’re right,” Frankie says. “You got me there, God damn it.”

Sol chuckles. “I’m glad you’re home, Frankie.”

“Me too.”

“Are you going to tell Grace how you feel?”

Grace feels his words like a punch to the gut. A strangely welcome punch.

“I don’t know. I barely understand how I feel. Last month I was settled down with a dreamy retired yam farmer, for God’s sake. But on the other hand, I named a chicken after her during our tragic separation. How much more obvious can you get?? Maybe Joanne’s trying to tell me something.”

“Listen to Joanne. She always knows what she’s talking about.”

“Bitch is wise; there’s no denying that.”

Sol laughs.

“At least I’m back,” Frankie concludes. “Better confused as hell with Grace than certain without, right?”

“Right,” says Sol kindly. There’s a stretch of thoughtful silence before he says, “We’d better head back in. We’re going to kick off part two with Alien Dance Party.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

This is Grace’s cue to do something. Burst into the studio like she hadn’t heard anything to tell them intermission is over. Run.

She keeps standing still.

“But give me a minute,” Frankie adds. “Inspiration’s calling.”

Sol slips out of the studio. And right into Grace.

“I’m not here,” Grace hisses at him, the mess of emotions inside of her manifesting as straight up homicidal fury.

Sol’s baffled expression (also known as his face) shifts to something more affable. He obediently mimes zipping his lips. There’s a knowing light in his eyes. Grace watches him walk back to the house, moving a lot quicker than he usually does. Almost like he wants to give them privacy.

Privacy. Between her and Frankie. It seems ridiculous. For so long, all she’d wanted--or at least told herself she’d wanted--was privacy _from_ Frankie. And now ...

She isn’t the only one who’s been feeling these things. Frankie, Frankie woke up in the mornings hurting too.

So there’s a chance. A good chance, even. As soon as this ridiculous improv party is over, Grace will sit Frankie down and talk this out with her. Talking things out is, to Grace, still akin to slowly shoving hairpins in your eyes, but she’s gotten better at it over the past few years. And what could be more worth an awkward conversation than this?

Yes. Good. She’s got a plan. Finally.

And then Frankie steps out of the studio. She has a paintbrush tucked behind her ear and a faint streak of green on her cheek, and she’s humming to herself, and every bit of reason and dignity that Grace has goes straight to hell at the sight of her.

Grace lunges forward and throws her arms around Frankie, pushing her accidentally backwards through the doorway of the studio. They’re caught half in and half outside, the murmur of the waves and the jolly voices from the house gently disrupting the quiet of the studio.

“What the dickens?” Frankie sputters.

“I love you, Frankie,” Grace says, hugging her tight. The truth pours right out of her, suddenly easy.

“I love you too, crazy lady. Now calm down; you’re gonna sprain something. It might be something of yours, it might be something of mine, but it’ll be something—” Frankie catches Grace’s eye then, and the laughter on her face quiets. “I love you too,” she says softly.

“Thank you.” Grace finds herself wiping tears from under her eyes. It only fits, that she’s crying again. One last emotional collapse.

“You don’t have to thank me,” Frankie protests.

“No, I do.” Grace sniffles. “You had everything, and you still came back. For ...”

Frankie presses her thumb gently beneath Grace’s eye, catching a tear. “I didn’t have everything. I really didn’t.” Her touch shifts, her curled fingers brushing Grace’s cheek. “Now, though? I’m set for life.”

Grace doesn’t mean to do it. She doesn’t even think about it, for once. It’s the easiest thing in the world. A step without feet.

Frankie’s lips are still at first, just long enough for Grace to wonder if she’s made a terrible mistake, if naming a chicken after someone really is a platonic move—but then Frankie kisses her back, melting like in a fairytale about a statue turning to flesh, melting in a way Grace knows by heart. She’s been melting ever since the beach house became her home.

Frankie wraps her arms around Grace’s shoulders, pulling her closer, and the familiarity of her embrace startles Grace backwards.

Frankie.

She’s kissing _Frankie_.

Her most maddening enemy. Her truest friend. Her truest anything.

They pull apart, staring into each other’s eyes. Frankie looks more stoned than Grace has ever seen her. Grace can’t help but take that—even in this, the craziest moment of her life—as a compliment.

“You told me once that platonic mouth-kissers are touchy feely freaks who should be banished from polite society,” Frankie says wonderingly.

“I still stand by that,” Grace answers, breathless.

Frankie tilts her head—pensive, or maybe sly. “Are we touchy-feely freaks who should be banished from polite society, Grace?”

“I don’t think so,” Grace answers with a trembling smile. “Do you?”

Frankie shakes her head, a mischievous and totally fucking delighted grin spreading across her face. She cups Grace’s face in her hands and leans in again, and—

 _Oh_ , this. This is it. Why there are love songs. Why Robert left. The thing she had given up on ever finding and keeping.

“Mom!” comes Brianna’s voice from the house.

“Mom!” echoes Bud.

“MOMS!” the kids all cry out in inconvenient unison.

“Grace and Frankie, report to the beach house!” booms Robert.

“Or take your time doing whatever it is you’re doing!” comes Sol’s benevolent warble.

“Sol, you’re not helping,” Robert chastises in sing-song.

 _What a bunch of inconvenient lunatics,_ Grace thinks. With love, of course.

“Should we get back to this later?” Frankie asks, hiding her smile behind her hand.

“You know where I live,” Grace says, a little unintended purr sneaking into her voice.

They meet each other’s eyes and dissolve, for a moment, into hopeless laughter, clutching each other’s hands.

“This is insane,” Frankie manages through her laughter.

“I know!” Grace says.

“I’m so fuckin’ _happy_.”

“I _know_!”

“Oh my God.” Frankie gasps. “You know, Sol might suspect--”

“You think?” Grace scoffs.

“But how are we going to tell _Robert_?”

Oh. _Oh._

Now there’s a thought.

Grace grins. “Excruciatingly.”

Frankie cackles, delighted, and lifts her hand for a high five. Grace happily obliges, and knits her fingers with Frankie’s instead of letting go.

 

_The End_


	10. The Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, one more tiny installment. You can't just end on 9 chapters!
> 
> Here's a YouTube link to [a certain accompanying tune](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGMabBGydC0), for your authentic reading experience.

It’s a beautiful sunny Sunday morning: the perfect type of morning to grab the kids and take them over to Grandma and Kind Of Other Grandma’s house for a swim in the pool. Brianna is still trying to do the better-sister, better-aunt thing, and so she tags along. She’s got a stack of magazines and a firm resolve to coo and make funny faces at the babies until they like her. (That was Barry’s advice. ‘Just coo and make funny faces, and they’ll love you.’ Barry has a real knack for intuiting the way you’re supposed to act around other human beings to make them not fear you.)

According to Mallory, their mom and Frankie both haven’t answered her texts about coming by, but both of them have said “You’re welcome anytime” often enough that it’s time for them to make good on it.

“Maybe they went shopping or out to breakfast or something,” says Mallory as they pull into the driveway. “It’s okay, Mom gave me a key--”

Both cars are parked in the driveway.

“Huh,” says Mallory. She glances at Brianna, worried. “You don’t think they …”

“Both died?” Brianna says. “Nah. They’ll never be that in sync. It would be a total betrayal of their whole Odd Couple schtick.”

“Right,” says Mallory, relieved.

Oh, the joys of having septuagenarian parents.

They get out of the car. Brianna pretends to watch Madison and Macklin so she doesn’t get roped into baby-holding duty.

Madison runs up to the front door and rings the bell a few times. No answer.

“They’re listening to music!” Madison reports.

“Oh, they are?” says Brianna, trying to sound peppy, like this is the most fascinating conversation she’s ever had. Kids like when you do that.

She follows Madison up to the door, and starts to hear the music too. It’s weird. Her mom has never really been a blast-the-music kind of person, and she doubts Frankie would be allowed to get away with it while sharing a roof with Grace.

“What the hell _is_ that?” Mallory muses, coming up behind her with a kiddo in each arm.

Brianna listens for a couple seconds, trying to figure it out.

Then her world crumbles in on itself.

“Oh, SHIT,” she says.

“What?” Mallory frowns.

“You said a bad word!” contributes Macklin gleefully.

Brianna turns and stares dead on into her sister’s eyes. “Abandon ship. _Abandon ship_ . Let’s go. Let’s _move_.” She tries to usher the kids back down the driveway.

“But the kids had their hearts set on swimming,” Mallory protests. “We can just let ourselves in--”

“Believe me, Mal. The kids don’t want to go swimming that much. And we do not want to walk in on whatever’s going on in there.”

“What are you talking abo—” Mallory’s eyes get big with sudden comprehension. “It’s happening?”

“Like it’s 199-fu...reaking-7!” Brianna snarls.

That’s all it takes to get her sister to wise up.

“Let’s go out for ice cream instead!” Mallory cries. Her mom voice sounds a whole lot more like a crazy person voice, but can Brianna blame her right now? No! No she can’t! “Ice cream, yay!”

“Yay!!!” Brianna contributes. Psyches depend on this! Young, innocent psyches! But also, more importantly: older, more bitter psyches like Brianna’s!

“Can Grandma and Frankie come with us?” asks Madison, hovering at the door. “Frankie loves ice cream. She’ll probably be mad if we don’t invite her.”

“No!” says Mallory. “Grandma and Frankie can’t make it, actually!”

“Why not?” asks Macklin, tilting his head.

“Because Grandma Frankie’s already eating out,” says Brianna. She doesn’t mean to. She’s unhinged. The nightmare is spilling right out of her mouth.

“NO, BRIANNA,” Mallory bellows. “NO.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” points out Macklin. “How can they be eating out if they’re inside?”

“It will make sense when you’re older,” Brianna promises.

“No it won’t!” Mallory hollers.

“Come on, Mal,” Brianna says; they might be in the middle of an emergency, but this shit matters. “Are you really going to be that mom who doesn’t teach their son about the importance of cunn—going out for ice cream?”

“Everything about this is the worst!” Mallory howls.

“Not for Grace Hanson,” Brianna points out, then feels like she should probably slam her head in a door immediately.

“True,” says Mallory. Then she turns kind of green. To the kids, she barks,  “Quick, to the car, to the car!”

The kids finally start moving their butts back into the car, picking up on the apocalyptic urgency of this moment.

“In a removed way,” Mallory says dazedly to Brianna as she straps the twins into their carseats, “I think I’m kind of … happy for them?”

“Hell,” says Brianna, “as long as none of the specifics never--and I mean _never_ \--reach my ears, this is the best day ever.”

“I _thought_ they were in the studio for too long on improv night! Something must have happened!”

“It’s official: Brianna and Mal have two mommies. _And_ two daddies.”

Mallory winces. “I really need to stop making out with Coyote, don’t I?”

Brianna claps her hands over her ears. And then her eyes. And then gives up. “So many disturbing visuals to try to repress. What did I do to deserve today? Is the universe punishing me for the fact that I still can’t tell your babies apart?”

“Yes,” says Mallory.

“Oh, helloooo!” Brianna looks over to see a seriously annoying-looking middle aged chick in a floppy sunhat walking from the driveway of the house next door.

“You’re the daughters, aren’t you?” she asks, just bustling on over like she belongs here. “I’m Brenda from next door. Your mom has probably mentioned me; we had just a wonderful chat awhile back, when her … partner was out of town. I’m so sorry you’re not able to get into the house! They’ve been at it all morning. They must really like The Proclaimers!”

“Rusted Root,” Mallory corrects sadly.

“In fact, I thought I heard some _yelling_ for awhile there. Or maybe screaming would be the better term--”

“Ma’am,” says Brianna, “I’m sure you’re a very nice person, but if you say one more thing, I’m going to be forced to kill you with my bare hands right now.”

“I--”

“ _Right._ Now.”

“Well, all right then,” says Brenda, tittering nervously. “Better luck next time. Have a lovely day!”

And with that, the Hanson sisters take their chance at freedom, clambering in the car with the urgency of secret agents being chased by heavily armed enemies.

“Just drive,” Brianna says bleakly, “and never look back.”

“Hell yeah,” says Mallory.

“Mom, you said hell!” cries Macklin.

“Some things deserve it, kid,” Brianna says. “Some things deserve it.”

“I still think Frankie’s going to be disappointed,” Madison says authoritatively. “What’s better than ice cream??”

 

+

  
“I just _knew_ it was a happy gay house,” Brenda mutters in satisfaction, watching the car zoom away. Then she moseys back to her own house, bopping her head to the distant music all the while. Those lesbians sure do have catchy taste.

 

_The Real End_


End file.
